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ZONE 
POLICEMAN 

88 

A CLOSE RANGE STUDY OF THE 
PANAMA CANAL AND ITS WORKERS 



BY 



HARRY A. FRANCK 

Author of "A Vagabond Journey Around the 

World" and "Four Months 

Afoot in Spain" 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1913 






Copyright, 1913, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, April, 1913 






O 



$4 



TO 
A HOST OF GOOD FELLOWS 

THE ZONE POLICE 



Quito, December SI, 1912 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Zone Police mounted squad on "Aviation 

Day" Frontispiece \ 

(Photograph by Leo Hays) 

PAGE 

The " Thousand Stairs * 7 v 

The Administration Building at Ancon. Police Head- 
quarters is in the nearest third-story corner ... 7 L 

Corozal Police Station 14 

Among the ruins of Old Panama 14 ,/ 

"The Boss" 41 

Squatter's hut built of dynamite boxes under a mango 

tree in the outskirts of Empire 41», 

A suburban dwelling 52 

" Neuvo Kingston," a negro tenement of Empire. Each 
sheet-iron cooking-place on the veranda rail represents 

a family 59 

" Ah don' rightly know mah age, mahster ; ah gone los' 

mah age paper " 59 

A dwelling in " the bush " 74 - 

Along the P. R. R. in New Gatun 74 ^ 

" The Atlantic breaking with its ages-old, mysterious roll " 84 

A San Bias Indian Boy -. . . 89 

The end of the noon hour 89 

" Toward noon the labor-train screamed in " . . . . 103 

Laborers hurrying to the mess-hall 103 

Some of the "Enumerated"' 110 

An I. C. C. free public school for non-whites . . . . 126 r 

A gang of Greeks 126 

Culebra Island, Zone quarantine station 133 1 

" Across the bay on the lower slope of a long hill drowsed 

the city of Panama" 138 

A Zone Police launch 151 i 

Off on mounted patrol 151 v 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Some of the costs of the canal 157 v 

Down the beat in New Gatun, the Caribbean in the dis- 
tance 177 v 

The winding back road between the two surviving Gatuns 177 V 
Six witnesses aggregating five nationalities. Left to right: 
two Turks, a Trinidadian, a Jamaican, a Barbadian, 

an Italian 188 

Gatun Police Station . . 195 v 

The lower reaches of the Chagres 195 »> 

"Far below were tiny men and toy trains" 1 .... 210 » 
"The week never passed that a group of priests from 
South America might not be seen peering over the 

dizzy precipice of Gatun locks " 210 

A Panamanian policeman and a Z. P. " gum-shoe " . .214 < 

Mounting to Fort Lorenzo 224 

The village from the fort 224 

Panama city from Police Headquarters 233 

"The Chief" addresses the "crack shots" at the target 

range • 238 

"Zoners" forced to live in box-cars are furnished all the 

comforts of home 238 

A " Policeman " 251 

Panamanian convicts 251 

The grove at the swimming beach 272 

"Lieutenant Long" and "Sergeant Jack" 272 v 

Cruces on the Chagres 284 * 

" Any hut might be a hiding-place " 284 

A Panamanian village 291 

"Why, the fact is," said Corporal Macey 298 

Z. P.'s — plain and otherwise . 298 

" B touched a match to the thatch roof " . . . .304 

The edge of the drowning forest 304 , 

" They will have forgotten that we paid $43,000 a year for 

oil, and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito " 309 



ZONE 

POLICEMAN 

88 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 



CHAPTER I 

STRIP by strip there opened out before me, as I 
climbed the " Thousand Stairs " to the red- 
roofed Administration Building, the broad panorama 
of Panama and her bay; below, the city of closely 
packed roofs and three-topped plazas compressed in 
a scallop of the sun-gleaming Pacific, with its 
peaked and wooded islands to far Taboga tilting 
motionless away to the curve of the earth; behind, 
the low, irregular jungled hills stretching hazily off 
into South America. On the third-story landing I 
paused to wipe the light sweat from forehead and 
hatband, then pushed open the screen door of the 
passageway that leads to police headquarters. 

" Emm — What military service have you had ? " 
asked " the Captain," looking up from the letter I 
had presented and swinging half round in his swivel- 
chair to fix his clear eyes upon me. 

* None." 

" No? " he said slowly, in a wondering voice; and 
so long grew the silence, and so plainly did there 



4 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

spread across " the Captain's " face the unspoken 
question, " Well, then what the devil are you apply- 
ing here for? " that I felt all at once the stern neces- 
sity of putting in a word for myself or lose the day 
entirely. 

" But I speak Spanish and — " 

" Ah ! " cried " the Captain," with the rising in- 
flection of awakened interest, " That puts another 
face on the matter." 

Slowly his eyes wandered, with the far-away look 
of inner reflection, to the vacant chair of " the 
Chief " on the opposite side of the broad flat desk, 
then out the wide-open window and across the shim- 
mering roofs of Ancon to the far green ridges of the 
youthful Republic, ablaze with the unbroken tropical 
sunshine. The whirr of a telephone bell broke in 
upon his meditation. In sharp, clear-cut phrases 
he answered the questions that came to him over 
the wire, hung up the receiver, and pushed the ap- 
paratus away from him with a forceful gesture. 

" Inspector : " he called suddenly ; but a moment 
having passed without response, he went on in his 
sharp-cut tones, " How do you think you would like 
police work? " 

" I believe I should." 

" The Captain " shuffled for a moment one of sev- 
eral stacks of unfolded letters on his desk. 

" Well, it 's the most thankless damned job in 
Creation," he went on, almost dreamily, " but it cer- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 5 

tainly gives a man much touch with human nature 
from all angles, and — well, I suppose we do some 
good. Somebody 's got to do it, anyway." 

" Of course I suppose it would depend on what 
class of police work I got," I put in, recalling the 
warning of the writer of my letter of introduction 
that, " You may get assigned to some dinky little 
station and never see anything of the Zone," — " I 'm 
better at moving around than sitting still. I no- 
tice you have policemen on your trains, or perhaps 
in special duty languages would be — " 

" Yes, I was thinking along that line, too," said 
" the Captain." 

He rose suddenly from his chair and led the way 
into an adjoining room, busy with several young 
Americans over desks and typewriters. 

" Inspector," he said, as a tall and slender yet 
muscular man of Indian erectness and noticeably 
careful grooming rose to his feet, " Here 's one of 
those rare people, an American who speaks some 
foreign languages. Have a talk with him. Per- 
haps we can arrange to fix him up both for his good 
and our own." 

" Ever done police duty? " began the Inspector, 
when " the Captain " had returned to the corner 
office. 

" No." 

" Military ser — " 

" Nor that either." 



6 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" Well, we usually require it," mused the Inspec- 
tor slowly, flashing his diamond ring, " but with 
your special qualifications perhaps — 

" You 'd probably be of most use to us in plain 
clothes," he continued, after a dozen questions as to 
my former activities ; " We could put you in uniform 
for the first month or six weeks until you know the 
Isthmus, and then — 

" Our greatest trouble is burglary," he broke off 
abruptly, rising to reach a copy of the " Canal Zone 
Laws " ; " If you have nothing else on hand you 
might run these over ; and the ' Police Rules and 
Regulations,' " he added, handing me a small, flat 
volume bound in light brown imitation leather. 

I sat down in an arm-chair against the wall and 
fell to reading, amid the clickity- click of typewriters, 
telephone calls even from far-off Colon on the At- 
lantic, and the constant going and coming of a negro 
orderly in shiningly ironed khaki uniform. By and 
by the Inspector drifted into the main office, where 
his voice blended for some time with that of " the 
Captain." At length he came back bearing a copy 
of the day's Star and Herald, turned back to the 
" Estrella de Panama " pages so rarely opened in 
the Zone. 

" Just run us off a translation of that, if you 
don't mind," he said, pointing to a short paragraph 
in Spanish. 

Some two minutes later I handed him the English 






<< t A 



i 



* ' ! I! 1 » I., '■ 




The Administration Building at Ancon 




The "Thousand Stairs 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 9 

version of the account of a near-duel between two 
Panamanians, and took once more to reading. It 
was more than an hour later that I was again in- 
terrupted. 

" You '11 want to catch the 5 :25 back to Corozal ? " 
inquired the Inspector ; " Mr. , give him trans- 
portation to Culebra and back, and an order for phys- 
ical examination. 

" You might fill out this application blank," he 
added, handing me a long legal sheet, " then in case 
you are appointed that much will be done." 

The document began with the usual, " Name , 

Birthplace , and so on." There followed the in- 
formation that the appointee " must be at least five 
feet eight; weigh one hundred and forty, chest at 
least thirty- four inches — " Then suddenly near the 
bottom of the back of the sheet my eyes caught the 
startling words ; — " Unless you are sure you are a 
man of physical appearance far above the average 
do not fill out this application." 

I was suddenly aware of a sinking feeling in the 
pit of my stomach; the blank all but slipped from 
my nerveless fingers. Then all at once there came 
back to me the words of some chance acquaintance 
of some far-off time and place, words which were the 
only memory that remained to me of the speaker, ex- 
cept that he had lived long and gathered much ex- 
perience, " Bluff, my boy, is what carries a man 
through the world. Act as if you 're sure you are 



10 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

and can and you '11 generally make the other fellow 
think so." I sat down at a desk and filled out the 
application in my most self-confident flourish. 

" Go to Culebra to-morrow," said the Inspector, as 
I bade the room good-day and stepped forth with 
my most military stride and bearing, " and report 
back here Friday morning." 

I descended to the world below, not by the long 
perspective of stairs that leads down and across the 
gully to the heart of Ancon, but by a short-cut that 
took me quickly into a foreign land. The graveled 
highway at the foot of the hill I might not have 
guessed was an international boundary had I not 
chanced to notice the instant change from the trim, 
screened Zone buildings, each in its green lawn, to 
the featureless architecture of a city where grass 
is all but unknown; for the formalities of cross- 
ing this frontier are the same as those of 
crossing any village street. It was my first 
entrance into the land of the panamefios, tech- 
nically known on the Zone as " Spigoties," and 
familiarly, with a tinge of despite, as " Spigs " ; be- 
cause the first Americans to arrive in the land found 
a few natives and cabmen who claimed to " Speaga 
dee Eng-leesh." 

To Americans direct from the States Panama 
city ranks still as rather a miserable dawdling vil- 
lage. But that is due chiefly to lack of perspec- 
tive. Against the background of Central America 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 11 

it seemed almost a great, certainly a flourishing, city. 
Even to-day there are many who complain of its un- 
pleasant odors; to those who have lived in other 
tropical cities its scent is like the perfumes of 
Araby; and none but those can in any degree realize 
what " Tio Sam " has done for the place. 

Toward sunset I passed through a gateway with 
scores of fellow-countrymen, all as composedly at 
home as in the heart of their native land. Across 
the platform stood a train distinctively American in 
every feature, a bilious-yellow train divided by the 
baggage car into two sections, of which the five 
second-class coaches behind the engine, with their 
wooden benches, were densely packed in every avail- 
able space with workmen and laborer's wives, from 
Spaniards to ebony negroes, with the average color 
decidedly dark. In the first-class cars at the Panama 
end were Americans, all but exclusively white Amer- 
icans, with only here and there a " Spigoty " with 
his long greased hair, his finger rings, and his 
effeminate gestures, and even a negro or two. For 
though Uncle Sam may permit individual states to 
do so, he may not himself openly abjure before the 
world his assertion as to the equality of all men by 
enacting " Jim Crow " laws. 

We were soon off. Settled back in the ample seat 
of the first real train I had boarded in months, with 
the roar of its length over the smooth and solid road- 
bed, the deep-voiced, masculine whistle instead of the 



12 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

painful, puerile screech that had recently assailed 
my ear, I all but forgot I was in a foreign land. 
The fact was recalled by the passing of the train- 
guard, — an erect and self-possessed young Amer- 
ican in " Texas " hat, khaki uniform, and leather 
leggings, striding along the aisle with a jerking, 
half-arrogant swing of the shoulders. So, perhaps, 
might I too soon be parading across the Isthmus ! 
It was not, to be sure, exactly the role I had planned 
to play on the Zone. I had come rather with the hope 
of shouldering a shovel and descending into the 
canal with other workmen, that I might some day 
solemnly raise my right hand and boast, " I helped 
dig IT." But that was in the callow days before 
I had arrived and learned the awful gulf that sep- 
arates the sacred white American from the rest of 
the Canal Zone world. Besides, had I not always 
wanted to be a policeman and twirl a club and stalk 
with heavy, law-compelling tread ever since I had 
first stared speechless upon one of those noble beings 
on my first trip out into the world twenty-one years 
before? 

It was not without effort that I rose in time next 
morning to continue on the 6 :37 from Corozal across 
another bit of the Zone. Exactly thus should one 
first see the Great Work, piece-meal, slowly; unless 
he will go home with it all in an undigested lump. 
The train rolled across a stretch of almost unin- 
habited country, with a vast plain of broken rock 




Among the ruins of Old Panama 




Corozal Police Station 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 15 



on the right, plunged unexpectedly through a short 
tunnel, and stopped at a station perched on the edge 
of a ridge above a small Zone town backed by some 
vast structure, above which here and there a huge 
crane loomed against the sky of dawn. Another 
mile and the collectors were announcing as brazenly 
as if they challenged the few " Spigs " on board 
to correct them, "Peter M'Gill! Peter M'Gill!" 
We were already moving on again before I had 
guessed that by this noise they designated none other 
than the famous Pedro Miguel. The sun rose sud- 
denly as we swung sharply to the left and rumbled 
across a girderless bridge. Barely had I time to 
discover that we were crossing the great canal itself 
and to catch a brief glimpse of the jagged gulf in 
either direction, before the train had left it behind, 
as if the sight of the world-famous channel were not 
worth a pause, and was roaring on through a hilly 
country of perpetual summer. A peculiarly shaped 
reservoir sped past on the left, twice or thrice more 
the green horizon rose and fell, and at 7 '30 we drew 
up at the base of Culebra, the Zone capital. 

On the screened veranda of a somewhat sooty. and 
dismal building high up near the summit of the 
town, another and I were pacing anxiously back 
and forth when, well on in the morning, an abrupt 
and rather gloomy-faced American dashed into the 
building and one of the rooms thereof, snapping 
over his shoulder as he disappeared, " One of you ! " 



16 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

The other had precedence. Then soon from behind 
the wooden shutters came a growl of " Next ! " and 
two moments later I was standing in the reputed 
costume of Adam on the scales within. At about 
ten-second intervals a monosyllable fell from the lips 
of the morose American as he delved into my per- 
sonal make-up from crown to toe with all the in- 
strumental circumspection known to his secret-dis- 
covering profession. Then with a gruff " Dress ! " 
he sat down at a table to scratch a few fantastic 
marks on the blank I had brought, and hand it to 
me as I caught up my last garment and turned to 
the door. But, alas — tight sealed ! and all the day, 
though carrying the information in my pocket, I 
must live in complete ignorance of whether I had 
been found lacking an eye or a lung. For sooner 
would one have asked his future of the scowling 
Parques than venture to invoke a hint thereof from 
that furrow-browed being from the Land of Brusk- 
ness. 

Meanwhile, as if it had been thus planned to give 
me such opportunity, I stood at the very vortex of 
canal interest and fame, with nearly an entire day 
before the evening train should carry me back to 
Corozal. I descended to the " observation plat- 
form." Here at last at my very feet was the famous 
" cut " known to the world by the name of Culebra ; 
a mighty channel a furlong wide plunging sheer 
through " Snake Mountain," that rocky range of 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 17 

scrub-wooded hills; severing the continental divide. 
At first view the scene was bewildering. Only grad- 
ually did the eye gather details out of the mass. 
Before and beyond were pounding rock drills, belch- 
ing locomotives, there arose the rattle and bump of 
long trains of flat-cars on many tracks, the crash 
of falling boulders, the snort of the straining steam- 
shovels heaping the cars high with earth and rock, 
everywhere were groups of little men, some working 
leisurely, some scrambling down into the rocky bed 
of the canal or dodging the clanging trains, all far 
below and stretching endless in either direction, 
while over all the scene hovered a veritable Pittsburg 
of smoke. 

All long-heralded sights — such is the nature of 
the world and man — are at first glimpse disappoint- 
ing. To this rule the great Culebra " cut " was no 
exception. After all this was merely a hill, a mod- 
erate ridge, this backbone of the Isthmus the sunder- 
ing of which had sent its echoes to all corners of the 
earth. The long-fed imagination had led one to 
picture a towering mountain, a very Andes. 

But as I looked longer, noting how little by. com- 
parison were the trains I knew to be of regulation 
U. S. size, how literally tiny were the scores upon 
scores of men far down below who were doing this 
thing, its significance regained bit by bit its proper 
proportions. Train after train-load of the spoil 
of the " cut " ground away towards the Pacific ; and 



18 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

here man had been digging steadily, if not always 
earnestly, since a year before I was born. The 
gigantic scene recalled to the mind the " industrial 
army " of which Carlyle was prone to preach, with 
the same discipline and organization as an army in 
the field; and every now and then, to bear out the 
figure, there burst forth the mighty cannonade, not 
of war, but of peace and progress in the form of 
earth-upheaving and house-rocking blasts of dyna- 
mite, tearing away the solid rock below at the very 
feet of the town. 

I took to the railroad and struck on further into 
the unknown country. Almost before I was well 
started I found myself in another town, yet larger 
than Culebra and with the name " Empire " in the 
station building; and nearly every rod of the way 
between had been lined with villages of negroes and 
all breeds and colors of canal workers. So on again 
along a broad macadamized highway that bent and 
rose through low bushy ridges, past an army en- 
camped in wood and tin barracks on a hillside, with 
khaki uniformed soldiers ahorse and afoot enlivening 
all the roadway and the neighboring fields. Never 
a mile without its town — how different will all this 
be when the canal is finished and all this community 
is gone to Alaska or has scattered itself again over 
the face of the earth, and dense tropical solitude 
has settled down once more over the scene. 

Panama, they had said, is insupportably hot. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 19 

Comparing it with other lands I knew I could not but 
smile at the notion. Again it was the lack of per- 
spective. Sweat ran easily, yet so fresh the air 
and so refreshing the breeze sweeping incessantly 
across from the Atlantic that even the sweating was 
almost enjoyable. Hot! Yes, like June on the 
Canadian border — though not like July. It is hot 
in St. Louis on an August Sunday, with all the 
refreshment doors tight closed — to strangers ; hot 
in the cottonfields of Texas, but with these plu- 
tonic corners the heat of the Zone shows little 
rivalry. 

The way led round a cone-shaped hill crowned by 
another military camp with the Stars and Stripes 
flapping far above, until I came at last in sight of 
the renowned Chagres, seven miles above Culebra, to 
all appearances a meek and harmless little stream 
spanned by a huge new iron bridge and forbidden 
to come and play in the unfinished canal by a little 
dam of earth that a steam-shovel will some day eat up 
in a few hours. Here, where it ends and the flat 
country begins, I descended into the " cut," dry and 
waterless, with a stone-quarry bottom. A sharp 
climb out on the opposite side and I plunged into 
rampant jungle, half expecting snake-bites on my 
exposed ankles — another pre-conceived notion — - 
and at length falling into a narrow jungle trail that 
pitched down through a dense-grown gully, came 
upon a fenced compound with several Zone buildings 



20 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

on the banks of the Chagres, down to which sloped 
a broad green lawn. 

Here dwells hale and ruddy " Old Fritz," for long 
years keeper of the fluviograph that measures and 
gives warning of the rampages of the Chagres. 
Fritz will talk to you in almost any tongue you may 
choose, as he can tell you of adventures in almost any 
land, all with a captivating accent and in the vocabu- 
lary of a man who has lived long among men and na- 
ture. Nor are Fritz' opinions those gleaned from 
other men or the printed page. So we fell to fan- 
ning ourselves this January afternoon on the 
screened and shaded veranda above the Chagres, and 
" Old Fritz," lighting his pipe, raised his slippered 
feet to the screen railing and, tossing away the 
charred remnant of a match, began : — 

" Vidout var dere iss no brogress. Ven all der 
vorld iss at peace, all der vorld goes to shleep." 

Police headquarters looked all but deserted on 
Friday morning. There had been " something 
doing " in Zone criminal annals the night before, and 
not only " the Captain " but both " the Chief " and 
the Inspector were " somewhere out along the line." 
I sat down in the arm-chair against the wall. A 
half -hour, perhaps, had I read when " Eddie " — I am 
not entitled, perhaps, to such familiarity, but the 
solemn title of " chief clerk " is far too stiff and 
formal for that soul of good-heartedness striving 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 21 

in vain to hide behind a bluff exterior — " Eddie," 
I say, blew a last cloud of smoke from his lungs to 
the ceiling, tossed aside the butt of his cigarette, and 
motioned to me to take the chair beside his desk. 

" It 's all off ! " said a voice within me. For the 
expression on " Eddie's " face was that of a man 
with an unpleasant duty to perform, and his open- 
ing words were in exactly that tone of voice in which 
a man begins, " I am sorry, but — " Had I not 
often used it myself? 

" The Captain," is how he really did begin, 
" called me up from Colon last night, and — " 

" Here's where I get my case nol prossed," I found 
myself whispering. In all probability that sealed 
document I had sent in the day before announced me 
as a physical wreck. 

" — and told me," continued " Eddie " in his sad, 
regretful tone, " to tell you we will take you on the 
force as a first-class policeman. It happens, how- 
ever, that the department of Civil Administration is 
about to begin a census of the Zone, and they are 
looking for any men that can speak Spanish. If we 
take you on, therefore, the Captain would assign you 
to the census department until that work is done — 
it will probably take something over a month — and 
then you would be returned to regular police duty. 
The Chief says he 'd rather have you learn the 
Isthmus on census than on police pay. 

" Or," went on " Eddie," just as I was about to 



22 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

break in with, " All right, that suits me," — " or, if 
you prefer, the census department will enroll you 
as a regular enumerator and we '11 take you on the 
force as soon as that job is over. The — er — pay," 
added " Eddie," reaching for a cigarette but chang- 
ing his mind, " of enumerators will be five dollars a 
day, and — er — five a day beats eighty a month 
by more than a nose." 

We descended a story and I was soon in confer- 
ence with a slender, sharp-faced young man of mobile 
features and penetrating eyes behind which a smile 
seemed always to be lurking. On the Canal Zone, 
as in British colonies, one is frequently struck by the 
youthfulness of men in positions of importance. 

" I '11 probably assign you to Empire district," the 
slender young man was saying, " there 's everything 
up there and almost any language will sure be some 
help to us. This time we are taking a thorough, 
complete census of all the Zone clear back to the 
Zone line. Here 's a sample card and list of in- 
structions." 

In other words kind Uncle Sam was about to give 
me authority to enter every dwelling in the most 
cosmopolitan and thickly populated district of his 
Canal Zone, and to put questions to every dweller 
therein, note-book and pencil in hand; authority to 
ramble around a month or more in sunshine and 
jungle — and pay me for the privilege. There are 
really two methods of seeing the Canal Zone; as an 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 23 

employee or as a guest at the Tivoli, both of them 
at about five dollars a day — but at opposite ends 
of the thermometer. 

There remained a week-end between that Friday 
morning and the last day of January, set for the 
beginning of the census. Certainly I should not 
regret the arrival of the day when I should become 
an employee, with all the privileges and coupon- 
books thereunto appertained. For the Zone is no 
easy dwelling-place for the non-employee. Our 
worthy Uncle of the chin whiskers makes it quite 
plain that, while he may tolerate the mere visitor, he 
does not care to have him hanging around ; makes it 
so plain, in fact, that a few weeks purely of sight- 
seeing on the Zone implies an adamantine financial 
backing. In his screened and full-provided towns, 
where the employee lives in such well-furnished com- 
fort, the tourist might beat his knuckles bare and 
shake yellow gold in the other hand, and be coldly 
refused even a lodging for the night; and while he 
may eat a meal in the employees' hotels — at near 
twice the employee's price — the very attitude in 
which he is received says openly that he is admitted 
only on suffrance — permitted to eat only because 
if he starved to death our Uncle would have the 
bother of burying him and his Zone Police the ar- 
duous toil of making out an accident report. 

Meanwhile I must change my dwelling-place. For 
the quartermaster of Corozal had need of all the 



M ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

rooms within his domain, need so imperative that 
seventeen bona fide and wrathy employees were even 
then bunking in the pool-room of Corozal hotel. 
Work on the Zone was moving steadily Pacificward 
and the accommodations refused to come with it — at 
least at the same degree of speed. 

Nor was I especially averse to the transfer. The 
room-mate with whom fate had cast me in House 81 
was a pleasant enough fellow, a youth of unobjec- 
tionable personal manners even though his " eight- 
hour graft " was in the sooty seat of a steam-crane 
high above Mii^iflores locks. But he had one slight 
idiosyncrasy that might in time have grown annoy- 
ing. On the night of our first acquaintance, after 
we had lain exchanging random experiences till the 
evening heat had begun a retreat before the gentle 
night breeze, I was awakened from the first doze by 
my companion sitting suddenly up in his cot across 
the room. 

" Say, I hope you 're not nervous ? " he remarked. 

" Not immoderately." 

" One of my stunts is night-mare," he went on, 
rising to switch on the electric light, " and when I 
get 'em I generally imagine my room-mate is a bur- 
glar trying to go through my junk and — " 

He reached under his pillow and brought to light 
a " Colt's " of 45 caliber ; then crossing the room he 
pointed to three large irregular splintered holes in 
the wall some three or four inches above me, and 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 25 

which I had not already seen simply because I had 
not chanced to look that way. 

" There 's the last three. But I 'm tryin' to break 
myself of 'em," he concluded, slipping the revolver 
back under his pillow and turning off the light again. 

Which is among the various reasons why it was 
without protest that, with " the Captain's " tele- 
phoned consent on the ground that I was now 
virtually on the force, I took up my residence in 
Corozal police station. 'T is a peaceful little build- 
ing of the usual Zone type on a breezy knoll across 
the railroad, with a spreading tree afid a little well- 
tended flower plot before it, and the broad world 
stretching away in all directions behind. Here 

lived Policeman T and B . " First-class 

policemen " perhaps I should take care to specify, 
for in Zone parlance the unqualified noun implies 
African ancestry. But it seems easier to use an ad- 
jective of color when necessary. Among their regu- 
lar duties was that of weighing down the rocking- 
chairs on the airy front veranda, whence each nook 
and cranny of Corozal was in sight, and of strolling 
across to greet the train-guard of the seven daily 
passengers; though the irregular ones that might 
burst upon them at any moment were not unlikely to 

resemble a Moro expedition in the Philippines. B 

and I shared the big main room; for T , being 

the haughty station commander, occupied the parlor 
suite beside the office. That was all, except the 



26 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

black Trinidadian boy who sat on the wooden shelf 
that was his bed behind a huge padlocked door and 
gazed dreamily out through the bars — when he 
was not carrying a bundle to the train for his wardens 
or engaged in the janitor duties that kept Corozal 
station so spick and span. Oh! To be sure there 
were also a couple of negro policemen in the smaller 
room behind the thin wooden partition of our own, 
but negro policemen scarcely count in Zone Police 
reckonings. 

" By Heck ! They must use a lot o' mules t' haul 
aout all thet dirt," observed an Arkansas farmer to 
his nephew, home from the Zone on vacation. He 
would have thought so indeed could he have spent 
a day at Corozal and watched the unbroken deafen- 
ing procession of dirt-trains scream by on their way 
to the Pacific, — straining Moguls dragging a fur- 
long of " Lidgerwood flats," swaying " Oliver 
dumps " with their side chains clanking, a succes- 
sion as incessant of " empties " grinding back again 
into the midst of the fray. On the tail of every 
train lounged an American conductor, dressed more 
like a miner, though his " front " and " hind " negro 
brakemen were as apt to be in silk ties and patent- 
leathers. To say nothing of the train-loads that go 
Atlanticward and to jungle " dumps " and to many 
an unnoticed " fill." Then when he had thus 
watched the day through it would have been of in- 
terest to go and chat with some of the " Old Timers " 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 Tt 

who live here beside the track and who have seen, 
or at least heard, this same endless stream of rock 
and earth race by six days a week, fifty-two weeks 
a year for six years, as constant and heavily-laden 
to-day as in the beginning. He might discover, as 
not all his fellow-countrymen have as yet, that the 
little surgical operation on Mother Earth we are 
engaged in is no mule job. 

The week-end gave me time to get back in touch 
with affairs in the States among the newspaper files 
at the Y. M. C. A. building. Uncle Sam surely 
makes life comfortable for his children wherever he 
takes hold. It is not enough that he shall clean up 
and set in order these tropical pest-holes ; he will have 
the employee fancy himself completely at home. Here 
I sat in one of the dozen big airy recreation halls, 
well stocked with man's playthings, which the govern- 
ment has erected on the Zone; I, who two weeks be- 
fore had been thankful for lodging on the earth floor 
of a Honduranean hut. ,The Y. M. C. A. is the chief 
social center on the Isthmus, the rendezvous and 
leisure-hour headquarters of the thousands that in- 
habit bachelor quarters — except the few of the 
purely barroom type. " Everybody's Association " 
it might perhaps more properly be called, for ladies 
find welcome and the laughter of children over the 
parlor games is rarely lacking. It is not the circum- 
spect place that are many of its type in the States, 
but a real man's place where he can buy his ciga- 



28 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

rettes and smoke his pipe in peace, a place for men 
as men are, not as the fashion plates that mama's 
fond imagination pictures them. With all its ex- 
cellences it would be unjust to complain that the 
Zone " Y. M." is a trifle " low-brow " in its tastes, 
that the books on its shelves are apt to be " popular " 
novels rather than reading matter, that its phono- 
graphs are most frequently screeching vaudeville 
noises while the Slezak and Homer disks lie tucked 
away far down near the bottom of the stack. 

With the new week I moved to Empire, the " Rules 
and Regulations " in a pocket and the most indis- 
pensable of my possessions under an arm. Once 
more we rumbled through Miraflores tunnel through 
a mole-hill, past her concrete light-house among the 
astonished palms, and her giant hose of water wiping 
away the rock hills, across the trestleless bridge 
with its photographic glimpse of the canal before 
and behind for the limber-necked, and again I found 
myself in the metropolis of the Canal Zone. At the 
quartermaster's office my " application for quarters " 
was duly filed without a word and a slip assigning 
me to Room 3, House 47, as silently returned. I 
climbed by a stone-faced U. S. road to my new home 
on the slope of a ridge overlooking the railway and 
its buildings below. 

It was the noon-hour. My two room-mates, there- 
fore, were on hand for inspection, sprawlingly en- 
grossed in a — quite innocent and legal — card 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 29 

game on a table littered with tobacco, pipes, matches, 
dog-eared wads of every species of literature from 
real estate pamphlets to locomotive journals, and a 
further mass of indiscriminate matter that none but 
a professional inventory man would attempt to 
classify. About the room was the usual clutter of 
all manner of things in the usual unarranged, " un- 
womaned " Zone way, which the negro janitor feels 
it neither his duty nor privilege to bring to order; 
while on and about my cot and bureau were helter- 
skeltered the sundry possessions of an absent em- 
ployee, who had left for his six-weeks' vacation with- 
out hanging up his shirt . — after the fashion of 
" Zoners." So when I had wiped away the dust 
that had been gathering thereon since the days of 
de Lesseps and chucked my odds and ends into a 
bureau drawer, I was settled, — a full-fledged Zone 
employee in the quarters to which every man on the 
" gold roll " is entitled free of charge. 

Just here it may be well to explain that the I. C. 
C. has very dexterously dodged the necessity of lin- 
ing the Zone with the offensive signs " Black " and 
" White." 'T would not be exactly the distinction 
desired anyway. Hence the line has been drawn be- 
tween " Gold " and " Silver " employees. The first 
division, paid in gold coin, is made up, with a few 
exceptions, of white American citizens. To the 
second belong any of the darker shade, and all com- 
mon laborers of whatever color, these receiving their 



30 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

wages in Panamanian silver. 'T is a deep and sharp- 
drawn line. The story runs that Liza Lawsome, not 
long arrived from Jamaica, entering the office of a 
Zone dentist, paused suddenly before the announce- 
ment: 

Crownwork. Gold and Silver Fillings. 
Extractions wholly without Pain. 

There was deep disappointment in face and voice as 
she sat down with a flounce of her starched and snow- 
white skirt, gasping: 

" Oh, Doctah, does I have to have silver fillings ? " 
My room-mates, " Mitch " and " Tom," sat re- 
spectively at the throttle of a locomotive that jerked 
dirt-trains out of the " cut " and straddled a steam- 
shovel that ate its way into Culebra range. Whence, 
of course, they were covered with the grease and 
grime incident to those occupations. Which did not 
make them any the less companionable — though it 
did promise a distinct increase in my laundry bill. 
When they had descended again to the labor-train 
and been snatched away to their appointed tasks, 
I sat a short hour in one of the black " Mission " 
rocking-chairs on the screened veranda puzzling over 
a serious problem. The quarters of the " gold " em- 
ployee is as completely furnished as any reasonable 
man could demand, his iron cot with springs and 
mattress unimpeachable — but just there the ma- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 31 

ternal generosity of the government ceases. He 
must furnish his own sheets and pillow — must be- 
cause placards on the wall sternly warn him not to 
sleep on the bare mattress ; and the New York Sun- 
day edition that had served me thus far I had care- 
lessly left behind at Corozal police station. To be 
sure there were sheets for sale in Empire, at the 
Commissary — where money has the purchasing- 
power of cobble-stones, and coupon-books come only 
to those who have worked a day or more on the 
Zone. Then the Jamaican janitor, drifting in to 
potter about the room, evidently guessed the cause 
of my perplexity, for he turned to point to the bed 
of the absent " Mitch " and gurgled ; 

" Jes' you make lub to dat man what got dat 
bed. Him got plenty ob sheets." Which proved a 
wise suggestion. 

Empire hotel sat a bit down the hill. There the 
" gold " ranks were again subdivided. The coat- 
less ate and sweltered inside the great dining-room; 
the formal sat in haughty state in what was virtually 
a second-story veranda overlooking the railroad 
yards and a part of the town, where were tables of 
four, electric fans, and " Ben " to serve with butler 
formality. I found it worth while to climb the hill 
for my coat thrice a day. As yet I was jangling 
down a Panamanian dollar at each appearance, but 
the day was not far distant when I should receive 
the " recruits " hotel-book and soon grow as ac- 



82 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

customed as the rest to having a coupon snatched 
from it by the yellow negro at the door. Uncle Sam's 
boarding scale on the Zone is widely varied. Three 
meals cost the non-employee $1.50, the " gold " em- 
ployee $.90, the white European laborer $.40, and 
negroes in general $.30. 

That afternoon, when the sun had begun to bow 
its head on the thither side of the canal, I climbed to 
the newly labeled census office on the knoll behind the 
police station, from the piazza of which all native 
Empire lies within sweep of the eye. " The boss," 
a smiling youth only well started on his third de- 
cade, whose regular duties were in the sanitary de- 
partment, had already moved bed, bag, and baggage 
into the room that had been assigned the census, that 
he might be " always on the job." 

Not till eight that evening, however, did the force 
gather to look itself over. There was the com- 
mander-in-chief of the census bureau, sent down from 
Washington specifically for the task in hand, under 
whom as chairmen we settled down into a sort of 
director's meeting, a wholly informal, coatless, ciga- 
rette-smoking meeting in which even the chief himself 
did not feel it necessary to let his dignity weigh upon 
him. He had been sent down alone. Hence there 
had been great scrambling to gather together on the 
Zone men enough who spoke Spanish — and with no 
striking success. Most noticeable of my fellow- 
enumerators, being in uniform, were three Marines 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 33 

from Bas Obispo, fluent with the working Spanish 
they had picked up from Mindanao to Puerto Rico, 
and flush-cheeked with the prospect of a full month 
on " pass," to say nothing of the $4.40 a day that 
would be added to their daily military income of 
$.60. Then there were four of darker hue, — Pan- 
amanians and West Indians ; and how rare are Span- 
ish-speaking Americans on the Zone was proved by 
the admittance of such complexions to the " gold " 
roll. 

Of native U. S. civilians there were but two 
of us. Of whom Barter, speaking only his nasal 
New Jersey, must perforce be assigned to the 
" gold " quarters, leaving me the native town of 
Empire. At which we were both satisfied, Barter 
because he did not like to sully himself by contact 
with foreigners, I because one need not travel clear 
to the Canal Zone to study the ways of Americans. 
As for the other seven, each was assigned his strip 
of land something over a mile wide and five long 
running back to the western boundary of the Zone. 
That region of wilderness known as " Beyond the 
Canal " was to be left for special treatment later. 
The Zone had been divided for census purposes into 
four sections, with headquarters and supervisor in 
Ancon, Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal respectively. 
Our district, stretching from the trestleless bridge 
over the canal to a great tree near Bas Obispo, was 
easily the fat of the land, the most populous, most 



34 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

cosmopolitan, and embracing within its limits the 
greatest task on the Zone. 

Meanwhile we had fallen to studying the w In- 
structions to Enumerators," the very first article of 
which was such as to give pause and reflection; 

" When you have once signed on as an enumerator 
you cannot cease to exercise your functions as such 
without justifiable cause under penalty of $500 fine." 
Which warning was quickly followed by the hair- 
raising announcement; 

" If you set down the name of a fictitious person " 
— what can have given the good census department 
the notion of such a possibility ? — " you will be 
fined $2,000 or sentenced to five years' imprisonment, 
or both." 

From there on the injunctions grew less nerve- 
racking : " You must use a medium soft black pencil 
(which will be furnished) " — law-breaking under 
such conditions would be absurdity — " use no ditto 
marks and " — here I could not but shudder as there 
passed before my eyes memories of college lecture 
rooms and all the strange marks that have come to 
mean something to me alone — " take pains to write 
legibly!" 

Then we arose and swarmed upstairs to an empty 

court-room, where Judge G , throwing away his 

cigarette and removing his Iowa feet from the bar 
of justice, caused us each to raise a right hand and 
swear an oath as solemn as ever president on March 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 35 

fourth. An oath, I repeat, not merely to uphold 
and defend the constitution against all enemies, 
armed or armless, but furthermore " not to share 
with any one any of the information you gather as 
an enumerator, or show a census card, or keep a 
copy of same." Yet, I trust I can spin this simple 
yarn of my Canal Zone days without offense to Uncle 
Sam against the day when mayhap I shall have oc- 
casion to apply to him again for occupation. For 
that reason I shall take abundant care to give no 
information whatsoever in the following pages. 



CHAPTER II 

THE boss " and I initiated the Canal Zone 
Census that very night. Legally it was to be- 
gin with the dawning of February, but there were 
many labor camps in our district and the hours bor- 
dering on midnight the only sure time to " catch 
'em in." Up in House 47 I gathered together the 
legion paraphernalia of this new occupation, — some 
two hundred red cards a foot long and half as wide, 
a surveyor's field notebook for the preservation of 
miscellaneous information, tags for the tagging of 
canvassed buildings, tacks for the tacking of the 
same, the necessary tack-hammer, the medium soft 
black pencil, above all the awesome legal " Commis- 
sion," impressively signed and sealed, wherein none 
other than our weighty nation's chief himself did 
expressly authorize me to search out, enter, and 
question ad libitum. All this swung over a shoulder 
in a white canvas sack, that carried memory back 
through the long years to my newsboy days, I de- 
scended to the town. 

" The boss " was ready. It was nearly eleven 
when we crossed the silent P. It. R. tracks and, 

plunging away into the night past great heaps of 

36 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 37 

abandoned locomotives huddled dim and uncertain in 
the thin moonlight like ghosts of the French fiasco, 
dashed into a camp of the laborer's village of 
Cunette, pitched on the very edge of the now black 
and silent void of the canal. Eighteen thick-necked 
negroes in undershirts and trousers gazed up white- 
eyed from a suspended card game at the long camp 
table. But we had no time for explanations. 

" Name ? " I shouted at the coal-hued Hercules 
nearest at hand. 

" David Providence," he bleated in trembling 
voice, and the great Zone questionnaire was on. 

We had enrolled the group before a son of wis- 
dom among them surmised that we were not, after 
all, plain-clothes men in quest of criminals ; and his 
announcement brought visible relief. Twice as many 
blacks were sprawled in the two rows of double-sided, 
three-story bunks, — mere strips of canvas on gas- 
pipes that could be hung up like swinging shelves 
when not in use. Mere noise did not even disturb 
their dreams. We roused them by pencil- jabs in the 
ribs, and they started up with savage, animal-like 
grunts and murderous glares which instantly sub- 
sided to sheepish grins and voiceless astonishment 
at sight of a white face bending over them. Now 
and again open-mouthed guffaws of laughter greeted 
the mumbled admission of some powerful buck that he 
could not read, or did not know his age. But there 
was nothing even faintly resembling insolence, for 



38 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

these were all British West Indians without a cor- 
rupting " States nigger " among them. A half- 
hour after our arrival we had tagged the barracks 
and dived into the next camp, blacker and sleepier 
and more populous than the first. It was February 
morning before I climbed the steps of silent 47 and 
stepped under the shower-bath that is always pre- 
liminary, on the Zone, to a night's repose. 

A dream of earthquake, holocaust, and general de- 
struction developed gradually into full conscious- 
ness at four-thirty. House 47 was in riotous up- 
roar. No, neither conflagration nor foreign inva- 
sion was pending; it was merely the houseful of en- 
gineers in their customary daily struggle to catch 
the labor-train and be away to work by daylight. 
When the hour's rampage had subsided I rose to 
switch off the light and turned in again. 

The rays of the impetuous Panama sun were 
spattering from them when I passed again the 
jumbled rows of invalided locomotives and machin- 
ery, reddish with rust and bound, like Gulliver, by 
green jungle strands and tropical creepers. By day 
the arch-roofed labor-camps were silent and empty, 
but for a lonely janitor languidly mopping a floor. 
Before the buildings a black gang was dipping the 
canvas and gas-pipe bunks one by one into a great 
kettle of scalding water. But there are also " mar- 
ried quarters " at Cunette. A row of six govern- 
ment houses tops the ridge, with six families in each 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 39 

house, and — no, I dare not risk nomination to an 
ever expanding though unpopular elub by stating 
how many in a family. I will venture merely to as- 
sert that when noon-time came I was not well started 
on the second house, yet carried away more than 
sixty filled-out cards. 

More than two days that single row of houses en- 
dured, varied by nights spent with " the boss " in 
the labor-camps of Lirio, Culebra way. Then one 
morning I tramped far out the highway to the old 
Scotchman's farm-house that bounds Empire on the 
north and began the long intricate journey through 
the private-owned town itself. It was like attending 
a congress of the nations, a museum exhibition of 
all the shapes and hues in which the human vegeta- 
ble grows. Tenements and wobbly-kneed shanties 
swarming with exhibits monopolized the landscape; 
strange the room that did not yield up at least a 
man and woman and three or four children. Day 
after blazing day I sat on rickety chairs, wash-tubs, 
ironing-boards, veranda railings, climbing creaking 
stairways, now and again descending a treacherous 
one in unintentional haste and ungraceful posture, 
burrowing into blind but inhabited cubby-holes,, 
hunting out squatters' nests of tin cans and dry- 
goods boxes hidden away behind the legitimate 
buildings, shouting questions into dilapidated ear- 
drums, delving into the past of every human being 
who fell in my way. West Indian negroes easily 



40 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

kept the lead of all other nationalities combined; 
negroes blacker than the obsidian cutlery of the 
Aztecs, blonde negroes with yellow hair and blue 
eyes whose race was betrayed only by eyelids and 
the dead whiteness of skin, and whom one could not 
set down as such after enrolling swarthy Spaniards 
as " white " without a smile. 

They lived chiefly in windowless, six-by-eight 
rooms, always a cheap, dirty calico curtain dividing 
the three-foot parlor in front from the five-foot bed- 
room behind, the former cluttered with a van-load 
of useless junk, dirty blankets, decrepit furniture, 
glittering gewgaws, a black baby squirming naked 
in a basket of rags with an Episcopal prayerbook 
under its pillow — relic of the old demon-scaring 
superstitions of Voodoo worship. Every inch of the 
walls was " decorated," after the artistic tempera- 
ment of the race, with pages of illustrated maga- 
zines or newspapers, half-tones of all things con- 
ceivable with no small amount of text in sundry 
languages, many a page purely of advertising mat- 
ter, the muscular, imbruted likeness of a certain black 
champion rarely missing, frequently with a Bible laid 
reverently beneath it. Outside, before each room, a 
tin fireplace for cooking precariously bestrided the 
veranda rail. 

Often a tumble-down hovel where three would seem 
a crowd yielded up more than a dozen inmates, many 
of whom, being at work, must be looked for later — 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 43 

the " back-calls " that is the bete-noire of the census 
enumerator. West Indians, however, are for the 
most part well acquainted with the affairs of friends 
and room-mates, and enrolment of the absent was 
often possible. Occasionally I ran into a den of 
impertinence that must be frowned down, notably a 
notorious swarming tenement over a lumber-yard. 
But on the whole the courtesy of British West In- 
dians, even among themselves, was noteworthy. Of 
the two great divisions among them, Barbadians 
seemed more well-mannered than Jamaicans — or 
was it merely more subtle hypocrisy? Among them 
all the most unspoiled children of nature appeared 
to be those from the little island of Nevis. 

" You ain't no American ? " 

" Yes, ah is." 

" Why, you de bery f urst American ah eber see 
dat was perlite." 

Which spoke badly indeed for the others, that not 
being one of the virtues I strive particularly to cul- 
tivate. 

But " perlite " or not, there can be no question of 
the astounding stupidity of the West Indian rank 
and file, a stupidity amusing if you are in an amus- 
able mood, unendurable if you neglect to pack your 
patience among your bag of supplies in the morn- 
ing. Tropical patience, too, is at best a frail child. 
The dry-season sun rarely even veiled his face, and 
there were those among the enumerators who com- 



44 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

plained of the taxing labor of all-day marching up 
and down streets and stairs and Zone hills beneath 
it; but to me, fresh from tramping over the moun- 
tains of Central America with twenty pounds on 
my shoulders, this was mere pastime. Heat had no 
terrors for the enumerated, however. Often in the 
hottest hour of the day I came upon negroes sleep- 
ing in tightly closed rooms, the sweat running off 
them in streams, yet apparently vastly enjoying the 
situation. 

Sunday came and I chose to continue, though 
virtually all the Zone was on holiday and even " the 
boss," after what I found later to be his invariable 
custom, had broken away from his card-littered 
dwelling-place on Saturday evening and hurried 
away to Panama, drawn thither and held till Mon- 
day morning — by some irresistible attraction. 
Sunday turns holiday completely on the Zone, even 
to hours of trains and hotels. The frequent pas- 
sengers were packed from southern white end to 
northern black end with all nations in gladsome 
garb, bound Panamaward to see the lottery drawing 
and buy a ticket for the following Sunday, across the 
Isthmus to breezy Colon, or to one of a hundred 
varying spots and pastimes. Others in khaki 
breeches fresh from the government laundry in 
Cristobal and the ubiquitous leather leggings of the 
" Zoner " were off to ride out the day in the jungles ; 
still others set resolutely forth afoot into tropical 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 45 

paths ; a dozen or so, gleaned one by one from all 
the towns along the line were even on their way to 
church. Yet with all this scattering there still re- 
mained a respectable percentage lounging on the 
screened verandas in pajamas and kimonas, " Old 
Timers " of four or five or even six years' standing 
who were convinced they had seen and heard, and 
smelt and tasted all that the Zone or tropical lands 
have to offer. 

Well on in the morning there was a general gather- 
ing of all the ditch-digging clans of Empire and 
vicinity in a broad field close under the eaves of 
the town, and soon there came drifting across to me 
at my labor, hoarse, frenzied screams ; sounding 
strangely incongruous beneath the swaying palm- 
trees ; 

" Come on ! Get down with his arm ! Aaaaahrrr ! " 

But my time was well chosen. In the Spanish camps 
above the canal, still and silent with Sunday, men at 
no other time to be run to earth were entrapped in 
their bunks, under their dwelling-places in the shade, 
shaving, exchanging hair-cuts, washing workaday 
clothes, reminiscing over far-off homes and pre- 
migratory days, or merely loafing. The same 
cheery, friendly, quick-witted fellows they were as 
in their native land, even the few Italians and rare 
Portuguese scattered among them inoculated with 
their cheerfulness. 



46 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Came sudden changes to camps of Martiniques, a 
sort of wild, untamed creature, who spoke a distress- 
ing imitation of French which even he did not for a 
moment claim to be such, but frankly dubbed patois. 
Restless-eyed black men who answered to their 
names only at the question " Cummun t'appelle ? " 
and give their age only to those who open wide their 
mouths and cry, "Caje-vous?" Then on again to 
the no less strange, sing-song " English " of 
Jamaica, the whining tones of those whose island trees 
the conquesting Spaniards found bearded — " bar- 
bados " — now and again a more or less dark Costa 
Rican, Guatemalteco, Venezuelan, stray islanders 
from St. Vincent, Trinidad, or Guadalupe, individ- 
uals defying classification. But the chief reward for 
denying myself a holiday were the " back-calls " in 
the town itself which I was able to check out of my 
field-book. Many a long-sought negro I roused from 
his holiday siesta, dashing past the tawdry calico 
curtains to pound him awake — mere auricular dem- 
onstration having only the effect of lulling him into 
deeper child-like slumber. The surest and often only 
effective means was to tickle the slumberer gently on 
the soles of the bare feet with some airy, delicate 
instrument such as my tack-hammer, or a convenient 
broom-handle or flat-iron. Frequently I came upon 
young negro men of the age and type that in white 
skins would have been loafing on pool-room corners, 
reading to themselves in loud and solemn voices from 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 47 

the Bible, with a far-away look in their eyes ; always 
I was surrounded by a never-broken babble of voices, 
for the West Indian negro can let his face run un- 
ceasingly all the day through, and the night, though 
he have never a word to say. 

Thus my " enumerated " tags spread further and 
wider over the city of Empire. I reached in due 
time the hodge-podge shops and stores of Railroad 
Avenue. Chinamen began to drift into the rolls, 
there appeared such names as Carmen Wah Chang, 
cooks and waitresses living in darksome back cup- 
boards must be unearthed, negro shoemakers were 
caught at their stands on the sidewalks, shiny-haired 
bartenders gave up their biographies in nasal mono- 
syllables amid the slop of " suds " and the scrape of 
celluloid froth-eradicators. Rare was the land that 
had not sent representatives to this great dirt-shovel- 
ing congress. A Syrian merchant gasped for 
breath and fell over his counter in delight to find 
that I, too, had been in his native Zakleh, five 
Punjabis all but died of pleasure when I mispro- 
nounced three words of their tongue. Occasionally 
there came startling contrast as I burst unexpectedly 
into the ancestral home of some educated native 
family that had withstood all the tides of time and 
change and still lived in the beloved " Emperador " 
of their forefathers. Anger was usually near the 
surface at my intrusion, but they quickly changed 
to their ingrown politeness and chatty sociability 



48 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

when addressed in their own tongue and treated in 
their own extravagant gestures. It was almost sure 
to return again, however, at the question whether they 
were Panamanians. Distinctly not! They were 
Colombians ! There is no such country as Panama. 

Thus the enrolling of the faithful continued. 
Chinese laundrymen divulged the secrets of their 
mysterious past between spurts of water at steam- 
ing shirt-bosoms ; Chinese merchants, of whom there 
are hordes on the Zone, cueless, dressed and be- 
tailored till you must look at them twice to tell them 
from " gold " employees, the flag of the new re- 
public flapping above their doors, the new president 
in their lapels, left off selling crucifixes and breast- 
pin medallions of Christ to negro women, to answer 
my questions. One evening I stumbled into a nest 
of eleven Bengali peddlers with the bare floor of their 
single room as bed, table, and chairs ; in one corner, 
surmounted by their little embroidered skull-caps, 
were stacked the bundles with which they pester Zone 
housewives, and in another their god wrapped in a 
dirty rag against profaning eyes. 

Many days had passed before I landed the first 
Zone resident I could not enroll unassisted. He was 
a heathen Chinee newly arrived, who spoke neither 
Spanish nor English. It was " Chinese Charlie " 
who helped me out. " Chinese Charlie " was a resi- 
dent of the Zone before the days of de Lesseps and 
at our first meeting had insisted on being enrolled 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 49 

under that pseudonym, alleging it his real name. 
Upstairs above his store all was sepulchral silence 
when I mounted to investigate — and I came quickly 
and quietly down again; for the door had opened on 
the gaudy Oriental splendor of a joss-house where 
dwelt only grinning wooden idols not counted as Zone 
residents by the materialistic census officials. On 
the Isthmus as elsewhere " John " is a law-abiding 
citizen — within limits; never obsequious, nearly al- 
ways friendly, ready to answer questions quite 
cheerily so long as he considers the matter any of 
your business, but closing infinitely tighter than the 
maltreated bivalve when he fancies you are prying 
too far. 

In time I reached the Commissary — the govern- 
ment department store — and enrolled it from cash- 
desk to cold-storage; Empire hotel, from steward to 
scullions, filed by me whispering autobiography ; the 
police station on its knoll fell like the rest. I went 
to jail — and set down a large score of black men 
and a pair of European whites, back from a day's 
sweaty labor of road building, who lived now in un- 
accustomed cleanliness in the heart of the lower story 
of a fresh wooden building with light iron bars, easy 
to break out of were it not that policemen, white and 
black, sleep on all sides of them. Crowded old Em- 
pire not only faces her streets but even her back 
yards are filled with shacks and inhabited boxes to 
be hunted out. On the hem of her tattered out- 



50 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

skirts and the jungle edges I ran into heaps of old 
abandoned junk, — locomotives, cars, dredges, boil- 
ers (some with the letters " U. S." painted upon 
them, which sight gave some three-day investigator 
material to charge the I. C. C. with untold waste) ; 
all now soon to be removed by a Chicago wrecking 
company. 

Then all the town must be done again — " back 
calls." By this time so wide and varied was my 
acquaintance in Empire that wenches withdrew a 
dripping hand from their tubs to wave at me with 
a sympathetic giggle, and piccaninnies ran out to 
meet me as I returned in quest of one missing inmate 
in a house of fifty. For the few laborers still un- 
caught I took to coming after dark. But West 
Indians rarely own lamps, not even the brass tax- 
numbers above the doors were visible, and as for a 
negro in the dark — 

Absurd rumors had begun early to circulate among 
the darker brethren. In all negrodom the convic- 
tion became general that this individual detailed 
catechising and house-branding was really a govern- 
ment scheme to get lists of persons due for deporta- 
tion, either for lack of work as the canal neared com- 
pletion or for looseness of marital relations. Hardly 
a tenement did I enter but laughing voices bandied 
back and forth and there echoed and reechoed 
through the building such remarks as : 

" Well, dey gon' sen' us home, Penelope," or 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 53 

"Yo an* Percival better hurry up an' git married, 
Ambrosia." 

Several dusky females regularly ran away when- 
ever I approached; one at least I came a-seeking in 
vain nine times, and found her the tenth behind a 
garbage barrel. Many fancied the secret marks on 
the " enumerated " tag — date, and initials of the 
enumerator — were intimately concerned with their 
fate. So strong is the fear of the law imbued by 
the Zone Police that they dared not tear down the 
dreaded placard, but would sometimes sit staring at 
it for hours striving to penetrate its secret or ex- 
orcise away its power of evil, and now and then some 
bolder spirit ventured out — at midnight — with a 
pencil and put tails and extra flourishes on the 
penciled letters in the hope of disguising them 
against the fatal day. 

Except for the chaos of nationalities and types on 
the Zone, enumerating would have become more than 
monotonous. But the enumerated took care to break 
the monotony. There was the wealth of nomencla- 
ture for instance. What more striking than a shin- 
ing-black waiter strutting proudly about under the 
name of Levi McCarthy? There was no necessity 
of asking Beresford Plantaganet if he were a British 
subject. Naturally the mother of Hazarmaneth 
Cumberbath Smith, baptized that very week, had to 
claw out the family Bible from among the bed-clothes 
and look up the name on the fly-leaf. 



54 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

To the enumerator, who must set down concise and 
exact answers to each of his questions, fifty or sixty 
daily scenes and replies something like these were 
delightful ; 

Enumerator (sitting down on the edge of a bar- 
rel) : "How many living in this room?" 

Explosive laughter from the buxom, jet-black 
woman addressed. 

Enumerator (on a venture) : " What 's the man's 
name ? " 

" He name 'Rasmus Iggleston." 

" What 's his metal-check number? " 

" Lard, mahster, ah don' know he check number." 

"Haven't you a commissary-book with it in?" 

" Lard no, mah love, commissary-book him 
feeneesh already befo' las' week." 

" Is he a Jamaican? " 

" No, him a Mont-rat, mahster." (Monsterra- 
tian.) 

"What color is he?" 

" Te ! He ! Wha' fo' yo as' all dem questions, 
mahster? " 

" For instance." 

" Oh, him jes' a pitch darker 'n me." 

"How old is he?" 

(Loud laughter) " Law', ah don' know how ol' 
him are ! " 

"Well, about how old?" 

" Oh, him a ripe man, mah love, him a prime man." 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 55 

" Is he older than you ?" 

" Oh, yes, him older 'n me." 

" And how old are you ? " 

" Te ! He ! 'Deed ah don' know how ol' ah is ; ah 
gone los' mah age paper." 

" Is he married? " 

(Quickly and with very grave face) " Oh, yes in- 
deed, mahster, Ah his sure 'nough wife." 

"Can he read?" 

(Hesitatingly) " Er — a leetle, sir, not too 
much, sir." (Which generally means he can spell 
out a few words of one syllable and make some sort 
of mark representing his name.) 

* What kind of work does he do? " 

(Haughtily) "Him employed by de I. C. C." 

" Yes, naturally. But what kind of work does he 
do. Is he a laborer? " 

(Quickly and very impressively) " Laborer ! Oh, 
no, mah sweet mahster, he jes' shovel away de dirt 
befo' de steam shovel." 

" All right. That '11 do for 'Rasmus. Now your 
name ? " 

" Mah name Mistress Jane Iggleston." 

" How long have you lived on the Canal 
Zone?" 

" Oh, not too long, mah love." 

" Since when have you lived in this house ? " 

" Oh, we don' come to dis house too long, sah." 

" Can you read and write ? " 



56 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" No, ah don' stay in Jamaica. Ah come to 
Panama when ah small." 

" Do you do any work besides your own house- 
work? " 

(Evasively) "Work? If ah does any work? 
No, not any." 

Enumerator looks hard from her to washtub. 

" Ah — er — oh, ah washes a couple o' gentlemen's 
clot'es." 

" Very good. Now then, how many children? " 

" We don' git no children, sah." 

" What ! How did that happen? " 

Loud, house-shaking laughter. 

Enumerator (looking at watch and finding it 
12 :10) : " Well, good afternoon." 

" Good evenin', sah. Thank you, sah. Te ! He ! " 

Variations on the above might fill many pages: 

" How old are you ? " 

Self-appointed interpreter of the same shade ; " He 
as' how old is yo? " 

" How old I are? Ah don rightly know mah age, 
mahster, mah mother never to? me." 

St. Lucian woman, evidently about forty-five, after 
deep thought, plainly anxious to be as truthful as 
possible : " Er — ah 's twenty, sir." 

" Oh, you 're older than that. About sixty, say? " 

"'Bout dat, sah." 

" Are you married? " 

(Pushing the children out of the way.) " N-not as 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 57 

jet, mah sweet mahster, bu-but — but we go 'n' be 
soon, sah." 

To a Barbadian woman of forty ; " Just you and 
your daughter live here? " 

" Dat 's all, sir." 

" Does n't your husband live here ? " 

" Oh, ah don't never marry as yet, sah." 

Anent the old saying about the partnership of life 
and hope. 

To a Dominican woman of fifty-two, toothless and 
pitted with small-pox : " Are you married ? " 

(With simpering smile) " Not as yet, mah sweet 
mahster." 

To a Jamaican youth; 

" How many people live in this room ? " 

" Three persons live here, sir." 

" I stand grammatically corrected. When did you 
move here? " 

« We remove here in April." 

" Again I apologize for my mere American gram- 
mar. Now, Henry, what is your room-mate's 
name ? " 

"Well, we calls him Ethel, but I don't know his 
right title. Peradventure he will not work this even- 
ing [afternoon] and you can ask him from him- 
self." 

" Do his parents live on the Zone? " 

" Oh, yes, sah, he has one father and one mother." 

An answer: "Why himself [emphatic subject 



58 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

pronoun among Barbadians] didn't know if he'd 
get a job." 

To a six-foot black giant working as night-hostler 
of steam-shovels: 

" Well, Josiah, I suppose you 're a Jamaican ? " 

" Oh, yes, boss, ah work in Kingston ten years as a 
bar-maid." 

"Married?" 

" No, boss, ah 's not 'xactly married. Ah 's livin' 
with a person." 

A colored family: 

Sarah Green, very black, has a child named Edward 
White, and is now living with Henry Brown, a light 
yellow negro. 

West Indian wit : 

A shop-sign in Empire : " Don't ask for cre'diii' 
He is gone on vacation since January 1, 1912." 

Laughter and carefree countenances are legion in 
the West Indian ranks, children seem never to be pun- 
ished, and to all appearances man and wife live com- 
monly in peace and harmony. Dr. O tells the 

following story, however: 

In his rounds he came upon a negro beating his 
wife and had him placed under arrest. The negro: 
" Why, boss, can't a man chastize his wife when she 
desarves and needs it ? " 

D r . o : "Not on the Canal Zone. It's 

against the law." 

Negro (in great astonishment): "Is dat so, boss. 




" Nuevo Kingston," a Negro tenement of Empire. Each sheet-iron cook- 
ing-place on the veranda rail represents a family 




'Ah don rightly know mah age, mahster; ah gone los' mah age paper" 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 61 

Den ah '11 never do it again, boss — on de Canal 
Zone." 

One morning in the heart of Empire a noise not 
unlike that of a rocky waterfall began to grow upon 
my ear. Louder and louder it swelled as I worked 
slowly forward. At last I discovered its source. In 
a lower room of a tenement an old white-haired Ja- 
maican had fitted up a private school, to which the 
elite among the darker brethren sent their children, 
rather than patronize the common public schools 
Uncle Sam provides free to all Zone residents. 
The old man sat before some twenty wide-eyed 
children, one of whom stood slouch-shouldered, 
book in hand, in the center of the room, and at 
regular intervals of not more than twenty seconds he 
shouted high above all other noises of the neighbor- 
hood; 

" Yo calls dat Eng-leesh ! How eber yo gon' l'arn 
talk proper lika dat, yo tell me ? " 

Far back in the interior of an Empire block I came 
upon an old, old negro woman, parchment-skinned 
and doddering, living alone in a stoop-shouldered 
shanty of boxes and tin cans. " Ah don' know how 
ol' ah is, mahster," was one of her replies, " but ah 
born six years befo' de cholera diskivered." 

" When did you come to Panama ? " 

w Ah d5n' know, but it a long time ago." 

" Before the Americans, perhaps ? " 

" Oh, long befo' ! De French ain't only jes' begin 



62 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

to dig. Ah's ashamed to say how long ah been 
here " (just why was not evident, unless she fancied 
she should long ago have made her fortune and left). 
" Is you a American? Well, de Americans sure have 
done one thing. Dey mak' dis country civilize. 
Why, chil', befo' dey come we have all de time here 
revolutions. Ah couldn't count to how many revo- 
lutions we had, an' ebery time dey steal all what we 
have. Dey even steal mah clothes. Ah sure glad fo' 
one de Americans come." 

It was during my Empire enumerating that I was 
startled one morning to burst suddenly from the 
tawdry, junk- jumbled rooms of negroes into a bare- 
floored, freshly scrubbed room containing some very 
clean cots, a small table and a hammock, and a general 
air of frankness and simplicity, with no attempt to 
disguise the commonplace. At the table sat a Span- 
iard in worn but newly washed working-clothes, book 
in hand. I sat down and, falling unconsciously into 
the " th " pronunciation of the Castilian, began 
blithely to reel off the questions that had grown so 
automatic. 

"Name?" — ; — Federico Malero. "Check Num- 
ber? "—" Can you read?" "A little." The 
barest suggestion of amusement in his voice caused 
me to look up quickly. " My library," he said, with 
the ghost of a weird smile, nodding his head slightly 
toward an unpainted shelf made of pieces of dynamite 
boxes, " Mine and my room-mates." The shelf was 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 63 

filled with four — real Barcelona paper editions of 
Hegel, Fichte, Spencer, Huxley, and a half-dozen 
others accustomed to sit in the same company, all 
dog-eared with much reading. 

" Some ambitious foreman," I mused, and went on 
with my queries: 

" Occupation ? " 

" Pico y pala," he answered. 

" Pick and shovel ! " I exclaimed — " and read 
those?" 

" No importa," he answered, again with that elu- 
sive shadow of a smile, " It does n't matter," and as 
I rose to leave, " Buenos dias, senor," and he turned 
again to his reading. 

I plunged into the jumble of negroes next door, 
putting my questions and setting down the answers 
without even hearing them, my thoughts still back 
in the clean, bare room behind, wondering whether 
I should not have been wiser after all to have ignored 
the sharp-drawn lines and the prejudices of my fel- 
low-countrymen and joined the pick and shovel Zone 
world. There might have been pay dirt there. A 
few months before, I remembered, a Spanish laborer 
killed in a dynamite explosion in the " cut " had 
turned out to be one of Spain's most celebrated 
lawyers. I recalled that El Unico, the anarchist 
Spanish weekly published in Miraflores contains some 
crystal-clear thinking set forth in a sharp-cut manner 
that shows a real inside knowledge of the " job " and 



64 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

the canal workers, however little one may agree with 
its philosophy and methods. 

Then it was due to the law of contrasts, I suppose, 
that the thought of " Tom," my room-mate, sud- 
denly flashed upon me; and I discovered myself 
chuckling at the picture, " Tom, the Rough-neck," to 
whom all such as Federico Malero with his pick and 
shovel were mere " silver men," on whom " Tom " 
looked down from his high perch on his steam-shovel 
as far less worthy of notice than the rock he was 
clawing out of the hillside. How many a silent 
chuckle and how many a covert sneer must the 
Maleros on the Zone indulge in at the pompous airs 
of some American ostensibly far above them. 



CHAPTER III 

MEANWHILE my fellow enumerators were re- 
porting troubles " in the bush." I heard par- 
ticularly those of two of the Marines, " Mac " and 
Renson, merry, good-natured, earnest-by-spurts, even 
modest fellows quite different from what I had hith- 
erto pictured as an enlisted man. 

" Mac " was a half and half of Scotch and Italian. 
Naturally he was constantly effervescing, both verb- 
ally and temperamentally, his snapping black eyes 
were never still, life played across his excitable, sunny 
boyish face like cloud shadows on a mountain land- 
scape, whoever would speak to him at any length must 
catch him in a vice-like grip and hold his attention by 
main force. He spoke with a funny little almost- 
foreign accent, was touching on forty, and was the 
youngest man at that age in the length and breadth 
of the Canal Zone. 

At first sight you would take " Mac " for a mere 
roustabout, like most who go a'soldiering. But be- 
fore long you 'd begin to wonder where he got his rich 
and fluent vocabulary and his warehouse of informa- 
tion. Then you 'd run across the fact that he had 
once finished a course in a middle-western university 

65 



66 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

— and forgotten it. The schools had left little of 
their blighting mark upon him, yet " pump " " Mac " 
on any subject from rapid-fire guns to grand opera 
and you 'd get at least a reasonable answer. Though 
you would n't guess the knowledge was there unless 
you did pump for it, for " Mac " was not of the type 
of those who overwork the first person pronoun, not 
because of foolish diffidence but merely because it 
rarely occurred to him as a subject of conversation. 
Seventeen years in the marine corps — you were sure 
he was " jollying " when he first said it — had taken 
"Mac" to most places where warships go, from Pe- 
kin and " the Islands " to Cape Town and Buenos 
Ayres, and given him not merely an acquaintance 
with the world but — what is far more of an acquisi- 
tion — the gift of getting acquainted in almost any 
stratum of the world in.the briefest possible space of 
time. 

" Mac " spoke not only his English and Italian 
but a fluent " Islands " Spanish ; he knew enough 
French to' talk even to Martiniques, and he could 
moreover make two distinct sets of noises that were 
understood by Chinese and Japanese respectively. He 
was a man just reckless enough in all things to be 
generous and alive, yet never foolishly wasteful either 
of himself or his meager substance. " Mac " first 
rose to fame in the census department by appearing 
one afternoon at Empire police station dragging a 
" bush " native by the scruff of the neck with one 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 67 

hand, and carrying in the other the machete with 
which the bushman had tried to prove he was a Colom- 
bian and not subject to questioning by the agents of 
other powers. 

Renson — well, Renson was in some ways " Mac's " 
exact antithesis and in some his twin brother. He 
was one of those youths who believe in spending prodi- 
gally and in all possible haste what little nature has 
given them. Wherefore, though he was younger than 
" Mac " appeared to be, he already looked older than 
" Mac " was. In Zone parlance " he had already 
laid a good share of the road to Hell behind him." 
Yet such a cheery, likable chap was Renson, so large- 
hearted and unassuming — that was just why you 
felt an itching to seize him by the collar of his olive- 
drab shirt and shake him till his teeth rattled for 
tossing himself so wantonly to the infernal bow-wows. 

Renson's " bush " troubles were legion. Not only 
were there the seducing brown " Spigoty " women out 
in the wilderness to help him on his descending trail, 
but when and wherever fire-water of whatever nation- 
ality or degree of voltage showed its neck — and it 
is to be found even in " the bush " — there was Ren- 
son sure to give battle — and fall. " It 's no use 
bein' a man unless you 're a hell of a man," was Ren- 
son's " influenced " philosophy. How different this 
was from his native good sense when the influence was 
turned off was demonstrated when he returned from 
cautiously reconnoitering a cottage far back in the 



68 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

wilds one dark night and reported as his reason for 
postponing the enumerating : " If you 'd butt in on 
one o' them Martinique booze festivals they 'd crown 
you with a bottle." 

Already one or two enumerators had gone back 
to private life — by request. Particularly sad was 
the case of our dainty, blue-blooded Panamanian. As 
with many Panamanians, and not a few of the 
self-exalted elsewhere, he was more burdened with 
blue corpuscles than with gray matter. At any 
rate — 

On our cards, after the query " Color ? " was a 
small space, a very small space in which was 
to be written quite briefly and unceremoniously 
"W," "B," or "Mx" as the case might be. 
Uncle Sam was in a hurry for his census. Early 
one afternoon our Panamanian helpmate burst 
upon one of his numerous aristocratic relatives 
in his royal thatched domains in the ancestral 
bush. When he had embraced him the customary fif- 
teen times on the right side and the fifteen accus- 
tomed times on the left side, and had performed the 
eighty-five gestures of greeting required by the so- 
cial manual of the bush, and asked the three hundred 
and sixty-five questions de rigueur regarding the 
honorable health of his honorable horde of offspring, 
and his eye had fallen again on the red cards in his 
hand, the fact struck him that the relative was of pre- 
cisely the same shade of complexion as himself. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 69 

Could he set him down as he had many a mere red- 
blooded person and thereby perhaps establish a pre- 
cedent that might result in his own mortification? 
Yet could he stretch a shade — or several shades — 
and set him down as " white " ? No, there was the 
oath of office, and the government that administered 
it had been found long-armed and Argus-eyed. 
Long he sat in deepest meditation. Being a Pana- 
manian, he could not of course know that Uncle Sam 
was in a hurry for his census. Till at length, as the 
sun was firing the western jungle tree-tops, a scin- 
tillating idea rewarded his unwonted cogitation. He 
caught up the medium soft pencil and wrote in aristo- 
cratic hand down across the sheet where other in- 
formation is supposed to find place; 

"Color; — A very light mixture," and taking 
his leave with the requisite seventy-five gestures and 
genuflexions, he drifted Empireward with the dozen 
cards the day had yielded. 

Which is why I was shocked next morning by the 
disrespectful report of Renson that " my friend the 
boss had tied a can to the Spig's tail," and our 
dainty and lamented comrade went back to the more 
fitting blue-blood occupation of swinging a cane in 
the lobbies of Panama's famous hostelries. 

But what mattered such small losses? Had not 
" Scotty " been engaged to fill the breach — or all 
of them, one or two breaches more or less made small 
difference to " Scotty." He was a cozy little barrel 



70 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

of a man, born in " Doombahrton," and for some 
years past had been dispensing good old Dumbarton 
English in Panama's proudest educational institution. 
But Panama's school vacation is during her " sum- 
mer," her dry season from February to April. What 
more natural then than that " Scotty " should have 
concluded to pass his vacation taking census, for 
obviously — " a mon must pick up a wee bit o' change 
wherever he can." 

I seemed to have been appointed to a purely sight- 
seeing job. One February noon I reported at the 
office to find that passes to Gatun had been issued to 
five of us, " Scotty," " Mac," Renson, and Barter 
among the number. The task in the " town by the 
dam site " it seemed, was proving too heavy for the 
regular enumerators of that district. 

We left by the 2:10 train. Cascadas and Bas 
Obispo rolled away behind us, across the canal I 
caught a glimpse of the wilderness surrounding the 
abode of " Old Fritz," then we entered a to me un- 
known land. I could easily have fancied myself a 
tourist, especially so at Matachin when " Mac " sol- 
emnly attempted to " spring " on me the old tourist 
hoax of suicided Chinamen as the derivation of the 
town's name. Through Gorgona, the Pittsburg of the 
Zone with its acres of machine-shops, rumbled the train 
and plunged beyond into a deep, if not exactly rank, 
endless jungle. The stations grew small and unim- 
portant. Bailamonos and San Pablo were withering 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 71 

and wasting away, " 'Orca L'garto," or the Hanged 
Alligator was barely more than a memory, Tabernilla 
a mere heap of lumber being tumbled on flatcars 
bound for new service further Pacificward. Of Fri- 
joles there remained barely enough to shudder at, 
with the collector's nasal bawl of " Free Holys ! " and 
everywhere the irrepressible tropical greenery was 
already rushing back to engulf the pigmy works of 
man. It seemed criminally wasteful to have built 
these entire towns with all the detail and machinery 
of a well governed and fully furnished city from 
police station to salt cellars only to tear them down 
again and utterly wipe them out four or five years 
after their founding. A forerunner of what, in a 
few brief years, will have happened to all the Zone 
— nay, is not this the way of life itself? 

For soon the Spillway at Gatun is to close its 
gates and all this vast region will be flooded and 
come to be Gatun Lake. Villages that were old when 
Pizarro began his swine-herding will be wiped out, 
even this splendid double-tracked railroad goes the 
way of the rest, for on February fifteenth, a bare few 
days away, it was to be abandoned and where we 
were now racing northwestward through brilliant sun- 
shine and Atlantic breezes would soon be the bottom 
of a lake over which great ocean steamers will glide, 
while far below will be tall palm-trees and the spread- 
ing mangoes, the banana, king of weeds, gigantic 
ferns and — well, who shall say what will become of 



72 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

the brilliant parrots, the monkeys and the ja- 
guars ? 

For nearly an hour we had not a glimpse of the 
canal, lost in the jungle to the right. Then suddenly 
we burst out upon the growing lake, now all but lick- 
ing at the rails beneath us, the Zone city of Gatun 
climbing up a hillside on its edge and scattering over 
several more. To the left I caught my first sight 
of the world-famous locks and dam, and at 3:30 we 
descended at the stone station, first mile-post of per- 
manency, for being out of reach of the coming flood 
it is built to stay and shows what Canal Zone sta- 
tions will be in the years to come. There remained 
for me but seven miles of the Isthmus still unseen. 

On the cement platform was a great foregathering 
of the census clans from all districts, whence we 
climbed to the broad porch of the administration 
building above. There before me, for the first time 
in — well, many months, spread the Atlantic, the 
Caribbean perhaps I should say, seeming very near, 
so near I almost fancied I could have thrown a stone 
to where it began and stretched away up to the bluish 
horizon, while the entrance to the canal where soon 
great ships will enter poked its way inland to the 
locks beside us. Across the tree-tops of the flat 
jungle, also seeming close at hand though the rail- 
road takes seven miles — and thirty-five cents if you 
are no employee — to reach it, was Colon, the tops of 
whose low buildings were plainly visible above the 




A dwelling in "the bush' 





Along the P. R. R. in New Gatun 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 75 

vegetation. Not many " Zoners," I reflected, catch 
their first view of Colon from the veranda of the Ad- 
ministration Building at Gatun. 

We had arrived with time to spare. Fully an hour 
we loafed and yarned and smoked before a whistle 
blew and long lines of little figures began to come 
up out of the depths and zigzag across the landscape 
until soon a line of laborers of every shade known to 
humanity began to form, pay-checks in hand; its 
double head at the pay-windows on the two sides of 
the veranda, its tail serpentining off down the hill- 
side and away nearly to the edge of the mammoth 
locks. Packs of the yellow cards of Cristobal district 
in hand — a relief to eyes that had been staring for 
days at the pink ones of Empire — we lined up like 
birds of prey just beyond the windows. As the first 
laborer passed this, one — nay, several of us pounced 
upon him, for all plans we had laid to line up and take 
turns were thus quickly overthrown and wild com- 
petition soon reigned. From then on each dived in 
to snatch his prey and, dragging him to the nearest 
free space, began in some language or other: 
"Where d'ye live?" 

That was the overwhelming problem, — in what lan- 
guage to address each victim. Barter, speaking only 
his nasal New Jersey, took to picking out negroes, 
and even then often turned away in disgust when he 
landed a Martinique or a Haytian. West Indian 
" English " alternated with a black patois that smelt 



76 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

at times faintly of French, muscular, bullet-headed 
negroes appeared slowly and laboriously counting 
their money in their hats, eagle-nosed Spaniards un- 
der the boina of the Pyrenees, Spaniards from Castile 
speaking like a gatling-gun in action, now and again 
even a snappy-eyed Andalusian with his s-less slurred 
speech, slow, laborious gallegos, Italians and Portu- 
guese in numbers, Colombians of nondescript color, 
a Slovak who spoke some German, a man from Pales- 
tine with a mixture of French and Arabic noises I 
could guess at, and scattered here and there among 
the others a Turk who j abbered the lingua franca of 
Mediterranean ports. I " got " all who fell into my 
hands. Once I dragged forth a Hindu, and shud- 
dered with fear of a first failure. But he knew a bit 
of a strange English and I found I recalled six or 
seven words of my forgotten Hindustanee. 

Then suddenly a flood of Greeks broke upon us, 
growing deeper with every moment. Above the 
pandemonium my companions were howling hoarsely 
and imploringly for the interpreter, while clutching 
their trembling victim by the slack of his labor-stained 
shirt lest he escape un-enrolled. The interpreter, in 
accordance with a well-known law of physics and the 
limitations of human nature, could not be in sixteen 
places at once. I crowded close, caught his words, 
memorized the few questions, and there was I with 
my " Poomaynes ? " " Poseeton ? " and " Padre- 
maynos ? " enrolling Greeks unassisted, not only that 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 Tf 

but haughtily acting as interpreter for my fellows — 
not only without having studied the tongue of Achil- 
les but never even having graced a Greek letter fra- 
ternity. 

Quick tropical twilight descended, and still the 
labor-smeared line wound away out of sight into 
the darkness, still workmen of every shade and tongue 
jingled their brass-checks timidly on the edge of the 
pay-window, from behind which came roaring noises 
that the Americans within fancied Spaniards, or 
Greeks, or Roumanians must understand because they 
were not English noises ; still we pounced upon the 
paid as upon a tackling-dummy in the early days of 
spring practice. 

The colossal wonder of it all was how these deep- 
chested, muscle-knotted fellows endured us, how they 
refrained from taking us up between a thumb and 
forefinger and dropping us over the veranda railing. 
For our attack lacked somewhat in gentle courtesy, 
notably so that of " the Rowdy." He was a chest- 
less youth of the type that has grown so painfully 
prevalent in our land since the soft-hearted abolish- 
ment of the beech-rod of revered memory ; of that all 
too familiar type whose proofs of manhood are ciga- 
rettes and impudence and discordant noise, and whose 
national superiority is demonstrated by the maltreat- 
ing of all other races. But the enrolled were all, 
black, white, or mixed, far more gentlemen than we. 
Some, of brief Zone experience, were sheepish with 



IS ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

fear and the wonder as to what new mandate this in- 
comprehensible U. S. was perpetrating to match its 
strange sanitary laws that forbade a man even to be 
uncleanly in his habits, after the good old sacred 
right of his ancestors to remotest ages. Then, too, 
there was a Zone policeman in dressy, new-starched 
khaki treading with dangling club and the icy-eye of 
public appearance, waiting all too eagerly for some 
one to " start something." But the great percent- 
age of the maltreated multitude were " Old Timers," 
men of four or five years of digging who had learned 
to know this strange creature, the American, and the 
world, too; who smiled indulgently down upon our 
yelping and yanking like a St. Bernard above the 
snapping puppy he well knows cannot seriously bite 
him. 

Dense black night had fallen. Here and there 
lanterns were hung, under one of which we dragged 
each captive. The last passenger back to Empire 
roared away into the jungle night; still we scribbled 
on, " backed " a yellow card and dived again into the 
muscular whirlpool to emerge dragging forth by the 
collar a Greek, a Pole, or a West Indian. It was like 
business competition, in which I had an unfair advan- 
tage, being able to understand any jargon in evi- 
dence. When at last the pay-windows came down 
with a bang and an American curse, and the serpen- 
tining tail squirmed for a time in distress and died 
away, as a snake's tail dies after sundown, I turneii 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 79 

in more than a hundred cards. To-morrow the tail 
would revive to form the nucleus of a new serpent, 
and we should return by the afternoon train to the 
lock city, and so on for several days to come. 

It was after nine of a black pay-day night. We 
were hungry. " The Rowdy," familiar with the lay 
of the land, volunteered to lead the foraging expedi- 
tion. We stumbled down the hill and away along 
the railroad. A faint rumbling that grew to a con- 
fused roar fell on our ears. We climbed a bank into 
a wild conglomeration of wood and tin architecture, 
nationalities, colors, and noises, and across a dark, 
bottomless gully from the high street we had reached 
lights flashed amid a very ocean of uproar. " The 
Rowdy," as if to make the campaign as real as pos- 
sible, led us racing down into the black abyss, whence 
we charged up the further slope and came sweating 
and breathless into the rampant rough and tumble 
of pay-day night in New Gatun, the time and place 
that is the vortex of trouble on the Isthmus. Merely 
a short street of one of the half-dozen Zone towns in 
which liquor licenses are granted, lined with a few 
saloons and pool-rooms ; but such a singing, howling, 
swarming multitude as is rivaled almost nowhere else, 
except it be on Broadway at the passing of the old 
year. But this mob, moreover, was fully seventy per- 
cent black, and rather largely French — and when 
black and French and strong drink mix, trouble 
sprouts like jungle seeds. Now and then Policeman 



80 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

G drifted by through the uproar, holding his 

" sap " loosely as for ready use and often half con- 
sciously hitching the heavy No. 38 " Colt " under his 
khaki jacket a bit nearer the grasp of his right hand. 
I little knew how familiar every corner of this scene 
would one day be to me. 

A Chinese grocer sold us bread and cheese. Down 
on the further corner of the hubbub we entered a 
Spanish saloon and spread ourselves over the " white " 
bar, adding beer to our humble collation. Beyond 
the lattice-work that is the " color line " in Zone dis- 
pensaries, West Indians were dancing wild, crowded 
" hoe-downs " and " shuffles " amid much howling and 
more liquidation; on our side a few Spanish laborers 
quietly sipped their liquor. The Marines of course 
were " busted." The rest of us scraped up a few 
odd " Spigoty " dimes. The Spanish bar-tender — 
who is never the " tough " his American counterpart 
strives to show himself — but merely a cheery good- 
fellow — drifted into our conversation, and when we 
found I had slept in his native village he would have 
it that we accept a round of Valdepenas. Which 
must have been potent, for it moved " Scotty " to un- 
button an inner pocket and set up an entire bottle of 
amontillado. So midnight was no great space off 
when we turned out again into the howling night 
and, having helped Renson to reach a sleeping-place, 
scattered to the bachelor quarters that had been 
found for us and lay down for the few hours that 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 81 

remained before the 5:51 should carry us back to 
Empire. 

At last I had crossed all the Isthmus and heard 
the wash of the Caribbean at my feet. It was the 
Sunday following our Gatun days, and nearly a month 
since my landing on the Zone. The morning train 
from Empire left me at the lake-side city for a run 
over locks and dam which the working days had not 
allowed, and there being no other train for hours I 
set off along the railroad to walk the seven miles to 
Colon. On either side lay hot, rampant jungle, low 
and almost swampy. It was noon when I reached the 
broad railroad yards and Zone storehouses of Mt. 
Hope and turned aside to Cristobal hotel. 

Cristobal is built on the very fringe of the ocean 
with the roll of waves at the very edge of its win- 
dows, and a far-reaching view of the Caribbean where 
the ceaseless Zone breeze is born. There stands the 
famous statue of Columbus protecting the Indian 
maid, crude humor in bronze; for Columbus brought 
Indian maids anything but protection. Near at hand 
in the joyous tropical sunshine lay a great steamer 
that in another week would be back in New York 
tying up in sleet and ice. A western bronco and a 
lariat might perhaps have dragged me on board, with 
a struggle. 

There is no more line of demarkation between Cris- 
tobal and Colon than between Ancon and Panama. 
A khaki-clad Zone policeman patrols one sidewalk, 



82 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

a black one in the sweltering dark blue uniform and 
heavy wintry helmet of the Republic of Panama 
lounges on the other side of a certain street; on one 
side are the " enumerated " tags of the census, on the 
other none. Cross the street and you feel at once a 
foreigner. It is distinctly unlawful to sell liquor on 
Sunday or to gamble at any time on the Canal Zone ; 
it is therefore with something approaching a shock 
that one finds everything " wide open " and raging 
just across the street. 

I wandered out past " Highball's " merry-go- 
round, where huge negro bucks were laughing and 
playing and riding away their month's pay on the 
wooden horses like the children they are, and so on 
to the edge of the sea. Unlike Panama, Colon is flat 
and square-blocked, as it is considerably darker in 
complexion with its large mixture of negroes from the 
Caribbean shores and islands. Uncle Sam seems to 
have taken the city's fine beach away from her. But 
then, she probably never took any other advantage 
of it than to turn it into a garbage heap as bad as 
once was Bottle Alley. On one end is a cement swim- 
ming pool with the announcement, " Only for gold 
employees of the I. C. C. or P. R. R, and guests of 
Washington Hotel." It is merely a softer way of 
saying, " Only white Americans with money can 
bathe here." 

Then beyond are the great hospitals, second only 
to those of Ancon, the " white " wards built out over 




i 



£ 

'o 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 85 

the sea, and behind them the " black " where the ne- 
groes must be content with second-hand breezes. 
Some of the costs of the canal are here, — sturdy 
black men in a sort of bed-tick pajamas sitting on the 
verandas or in wheel chairs, some with one leg gone, 
some with both. One could not but wonder how it 
feels to be hopelessly ruined in body early in life for 
helping to dig a ditch for a foreign power that, how- 
ever well it may treat you materially, cares not a 
whistle-blast more for you than for its old worn-out 
locomotives rusting away in the jungle. 

Under the beautiful royal palms beyond, all bent 
inland in the constant breeze are park benches where 
one can sit with the Atlantic spreading away to in- 
finity before, breaking with its ages-old, mysterious 
roll on the shore just as it did before the European's 
white sails first broke the gleaming skyline. Out to 
sea runs the growing breakwater from Toro Point, 
the great wireless tower, yet just across the bay on 
a little jutting, dense-grown tongue of land is the 
jungle hut of a jungle family as utterly untouched 
by civilization as was the verdant valley of Typee on 
the day Melville and Toby came stumbling down into 
it from the hills above. 

But meanwhile I was not getting the long hours 
of unbroken sleep the heavy mental toil of enumer- 
ation requires. Free government bachelor quarters 
makes strange bed-fellows — or at least room-fellows. 
Quartermasters, like justice, are hopelessly blind or I 



86 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

might have been assigned quarters upon the financial 
knoll where habits and hours were a bit more in keep- 
ing with my own. But a bachelor is a bachelor on 
the Zone, and though he be clerk to his highness " the 
Colonel " himself he may find himself carelessly tossed 
into a " rough-neck " brotherhood. 

House 47 was distinctly an abode of " rough- 
necks." A " rough-neck," it may be essential to ex- 
plain to those who never ate at the same table with 
one, is a bull-necked, whole-hearted, hard-headed, 
cast-iron fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, 
rock-tearing steam-shovel all day, wrestle the night 
through with various starred Hennessey and its 
rivals, and continue that round indefinitely without 
once failing to turn up to straddle his beam in the 
morning. He seems to have been created without the 
insertion of nerves, though he is never lacking in 
" nerve." He is a fine fellow in his way, but you 
sometimes wish his way branched off from yours for 
a few hours, when bed-time or a mood for quiet mus- 
ing comes. He is a man you are glad to meet in a 
saloon — if you are in a mood to be there — or tear- 
ing away at the cliffs of Culebra ; but there are other 
places where he does not seem exactly to fit into the 
landscape. 

House 47, I say, was a house of " rough-necks." 
That fact became particularly evident soon after sup- 
per, when the seven phonographs were striking up 
their seven kinds of ragtime on seven sides of us ; and 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 87 

it was the small hours before the poker games, car- 
ried on in much the same spirit as Comanche warfare, 
broke up through all the house. Then, too, many 
a " rough-neck " is far from silent even after he has 
fallen asleep; and about the time complete quiet 
seemed to be settling down it was four-thirty ; and a 
jarring chorus of alarm-clocks wrought new up- 
heaval. 

Then there was each individual annoyance. Let 
me barely mention two or three. Of my room-mates, 
" Mitch " had sat at a locomotive throttle fourteen 
years in the States and Mexico, besides the four years 
he had been hauling dirt out of the " cut." Youth- 
ful ambition " Mitch " had left behind, for though he 
could still look forward to forty, railroad rules had so 
changed in the States during his absence that he 
would have had to learn his trade over again to be 
able to " run " there. Moreover four years on the 
Zone does not make a man look forward with pleasure 
to a States winter. So " Mitch," like many another 
" Zoner," was planning to buy with the savings of 
his $210 a month " when the job is done " a chunk of 
land on some sunny slope of a southern state and 
settle down for an easy descent through old age. 
There was nothing objectionable about " Mitch " — 
except perhaps his preference for late-hour poker. 
But he had a way of stopping with one leg out of his 
trousers when at last all the house had calmed down 
and cots were ceasing to creak, to make some such 



88 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

wholly irrelevant remark as ; " By , that 

despatcher give me 609 to-day and she would n't pull 
a greased string out of a knot-hole " — and thereby 
always hung a tale that was sure to range over half 
the track mileage of the States and wander off some- 
where into the sandy cactus wilderness of Chihuahua 
at least before " Mitch " succeeded in getting out of 
the other trouser leg. 

The cot directly across from my own groaned — 
occasionally — under the coarse-grained bulk of 
Tom. Tom was a w rough-neck " par excellence, so 
much so that even in a houseful of them he was known 
as " Tom the Rough-neck," which to Tom was high 
tribute. Some preferred to call him " Tom the 
Noisy." He was built like a steam caisson, or an 
oil-barrel, though without fat, with a neck that 
reminded you of a Miura bull with his head down 
just before the estoque; and when he neglected to 
button his undershirt — a not infrequent oversight 
— he displayed the hairy chest of a mammoth go- 
rilla. 

Tom's philosophy of getting through life was 
exactly the same as his philosophy of getting through 
a rocky hillside with his steam-shovel. When it 
came to argument Tom was invariably right ; not that 
he was over-supplied with logic, but because he pos- 
sessed a voice and the bellows to work it that could 
rise to the roar of his own steam-shovel on those weeks 
when he chose to enter the shovel competition, and 



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- ■&' ■,,.-■■ *, ■■■v- 
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ZONE POLICEMAN 88 91 

would have utterly overthrown, drowned out, and an- 
nihilated James Stewart Mill himself. 

Tom always should have had money, for your 
" rough-neck " on the Zone has decidedly the 
advantage over the white-collared college graduate 
when the pay-car comes around. But of course be- 
ing a genuine " rough-neck " Tom was always deep in 
debt, except on the three days after pay-day, when 
he was rolling in wealth. 

Once I fancied the bulk of my troubles was over. 
Tom disappeared, leaving not a trace behind — ex- 
cept his working-clothes tumbled on and about his 
cot. Then it turned out that he was not dead, but in 
Ancon hospital taking the Keeley cure ; and one sum- 
mer evening he blew in again, his " cure " effected — 
with a bottle in his coat pocket and two inside his vest. 
So the next day there was Tom celebrating his re- 
covery all over House 47 and when next morning he 
did finally go back to his shovel there were scattered 
about the room six empty quart bottles each labeled 
" whiskey." Luckily Tom ran a shovel instead of a 
passenger train and could claw away at his hillside 
as savagely as he chose without any danger whatever, 
beyond that of killing himself or an odd " nigger " 
or two. 

We had other treasures on exhibition in 47. There 
was " Shorty," for instance. " Shorty " was a jolly, 
ugly open-handed, four-eyed little snipe of a rough- 
neck machinist who had lost " in the line of duty " 



92 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

two fingers highly useful in his trade. In conse- 
quence he was now, after the generous fashion of the 
I. C. C, on full pay for a year without work, pro- 
viding he did not leave the Zone. And while 
" Shorty," like the great majority of us, was a very 
tolerable member of society under the ordinary cir- 
cumstances of having to earn his " three squares a 
day," paid leisure hung most ponderously upon him. 

The amusements in Empire are few — and not 
especially amusing. There is really only one un- 
failing one. That is slid in glass receptacles across 
a yellow varnished counter down on Railroad Avenue 
opposite Empire Machine Shops. So it happened 
that " Shorty " was gradually winning the title of a 
thirty-third degree " booze-fighter," and passengers 
on any afternoon train who took the trouble to glance 
in at a wide-open door just Atlantic- ward of the sta- 
tion might have beheld him with his back to the track 
and one foot slightly raised and resting lightly and 
with the nonchalance of long practice on a gas-pipe 
that had missed its legitimate mission. In fact 
" Shorty " had come to that point where he would 
rather be caught in church than found dead without a 
bottle on him, and arriving home overflowing with joy 
about midnight slept away most of the day in 47 that 
he might spend as much of the night as the early clos- 
ing laws of the Zone permitted at the amusement 
headquarters of Empire. 

With these few hints of the life that raged be- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 93 

neath the roof of 47 it may perhaps be comprehen- 
sible, without going into detail, why I came to con- 
template a change of quarters. I detest a kicker. I 
have small use for any but the man who will take his 
allotted share with the rest of the world without 
either whining or snarling. Yet when an official gov- 
ernment census enumerator falls asleep on the edge 
of a tenement washtub with a question dead on his 
lips, or solemnly sets down a crow-black Jamaican as 
" white," it is Uncle Sam who is suffering and time 
for correction. 

But it is one thing for a Canal Zone employee to 
resolve to move, and quite another to carry out that 
resolution. Nero was a meek, unassertive, submis- 
sive, tractable little chap, keenly sensible to the suf- 
ferings of his fellows, compared with a Zone quarter- 
master. So the first time I ventured to push open 
the screen door next to the post office I was grateful 
to escape unmaimed. But at last, when I had done 
a whole month's penance in 47, I resorted to strategy. 
On March first I entered the dreaded precinct shielded 
behind " the boss " with his contagious smile, and the 
musical quartermaster of Empire was overthrown and 
defeated, and I marched forth clutching in one hand 
a new " assignment to quarters." 

That night I moved. The new, or more properly 
the older, room was in House 35, a one-story building 
of the old French type, many of which the Ameri- 
cans revamped upon taking possession of the 



94 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Isthmian junk-heap, across and a bit down the grav- 
eled street. It was a single room, with no room- 
mate to question, which I might decorate and other- 
wise embellish according to my own personal 
idiosyncrasies. At the back, with a door between, 
dwelt the superintendent of the Zone telephone sys- 
tem, with a convenient instrument on his table. In 
short, fortune seemed at last to be grinning broadly 
upon me. 

But — the sequel. I hate to mention it. I won't. 
It 's absurdly commonplace. Commonplace? Not a 
bit of it. He was a champion, an artist in his spe- 
cialty. How can I have used that word in connect 
tion with his incomparable performance? Or at- 
tempt to give a hint of life on the Canal Zone with- 
out mentioning the most conspicuous factor in it? 

He lived in the next room south, a half-inch wooden 
partition reaching half-way to the ceiling between 
his pillow and mine. By day he lay on his back in 
the right hand seat of a locomotive cab with his hand 
on the throttle and the soles of his shoes on the boiler 
plate — he was just long enough to fit into that 
position without wrinkling. During the early even- 
ing he lay on his back in a stout Mission rocking- 
chair on the front porch of House 35, Empire, C. Z. 
And about 8 p. m. daily he retired within to lie on 
his back on a regulation I. C. C. metal cot — they 
are stoutly built — one pine half-inch from my own. 
Obviously twenty-four hours a day of such onerous 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 95 

occupation had left some slight effects on his figure. 
His shape was strikingly similar to that of a push- 
ball. Had he fallen down at the top of Ancon or 
Balboa hill it would have been an even bet whether 
he would have rolled down sidewise or endwise — if 
his general type of build and specifications will per- 
mit any such distinction. 

When I first came upon him, reposing serenely in 
the porch rocking-chair on the cushion that uphol- 
stered his spinal column, I was pleased. Clearly he 
was no " rough-neck " — he could n't have been and 
kept his figure. There was no question but that he 
was perfectly harmless ; his stories ought to prove 
cheerful and laugh-provoking and kindly. His very 
presence seemed to promise to raise several degrees 
the merriment in that corner of House 35. 

It did. Toward eight, as I have hinted, he trans- 
ferred from rocking-chair to cot. He was not af- 
flicted with troublesome nerves. At times he was an 
entire minute in falling asleep. Usually, however, 
his time was something under the half; and he slept 
with the innocent, undisturbed sleep of a babe for at 
least twelve unbroken hours, unless the necessity of 
getting across the 66 cut " to his engine absolutely 
prohibited. Just there was the trouble. His first 
gentle, slumberous breath sounded like a small boy 
sliding down the sheet-iron roof of 35. His second 
resembled a force of carpenters tearing out the half- 
grown partitions. His third — but mere words are 



96 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

an absurdity. At times the noises from his gorilla- 
like throat softened down till one merely fancied 
himself in the hog-corral of a Chicago stockyards; 
at others we prayed that we might at once be trans- 
ferred there. A thousand times during the night 
we were certain he was on the very point of choking 
to death, and sat up in bed praying he would n't, 
and offering our month's salary to charity if he 
would; and through all our fatiguing anguish he 
snorted undisturbedly on. In House 35 he was 
known as " the Sloth." It was a gentle and kindly 
title. 

There were a few inexperienced inmates who had 
not yet utterly given up hope. The long hours of 
the night were spent in solemn conference. Pound- 
ing on the walls with hammers, chairs, and shoe-heels 
was like singing a lullaby. One genius invented a 
species of foghorn which proved very effective — in 
waking up all Empire east of the tracks, except " the 
Sloth." Some took to dropping their heavier and 
more dispensable possessions over the partition. One 
memorable night a fellow-sufferer cast over a young 
dry-goods box which, bouncing from the snorer's 
figure to the floor, caused him to lose a beat — one ; 
and the feat is still one of the proud memories of 35. 
On Sundays when all the rest of the world was up and 
shaved and breakfasted and off on the 8 :39 of a bril- 
liant, sunny day to Panama, " the Sloth " would be 
still imperturbably snorting and choking in the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 97 

depths of his cot. And in the evening, as the train 
roamed back through the fresh cool jungle dusk 
and deposited us at Empire station, and we crossed 
the wooden bridge before the hotel and began to 
climb the graveled path behind, hoping against hope 
that we might find crape on that door, from the 
night ahead would break on our ears a sound as of 
a hippopotamus struggling wildly against going 
down for the third and last time. 

Most annoying of all, " the Sloth " was not even 
a bona fide bachelor. He proudly announced that, 
though he was a model of marital virtue, he had not 
lived with his wife in many years. I never heard 
a man who knew him by night ask why. It was 
close upon criminal negligence on the part of the 
I. C. C. to overlook its opportunity in this matter. 
There were so many, many uninhabited hilltops on 
the Zone where a private Sloth-dwelling might have 
been slapped together from the remains of falling 
towns at Gatun end; near it a grandstand might 
even have been erected and admission charged. Or 
at least the daily climb to it would have helped to 
reduce a push-ball figure, and thereby have improved 
the general appearance of the Canal Zone force. 



CHAPTER IV 

ONE morning early in March " the boss " and 
I crossed the suspension bridge over the 
canal. A handcar and six husky negroes awaited 
us, and we were soon bumping away over temporary 
spurs through the jungle, to strike at length the 
"relocation " opposite the giant tree near Bas Obispo 
that marked the northern limit of our district. 

The P. R. R., you will recall, has been operating 
across the Isthmus since 1855. When the United 
States took over the Zone in 1904 it built a new 
double-tracked line of five-foot gauge for nearly the 
whole forty-seven miles. Much of this, however, runs 
through territory soon to be covered by Gatun Lake, 
nearly all the rest of it is on the wrong side of the 
canal. An almost entirely new line, therefore, is 
being built through the virgin jungle on the South 
American side of the canal, which is to be the perma- 
nent line and is known in Zone parlance as the " re- 
location." This is forty-nine miles in length from 
Panama to Colon, and is single track only, as freight 
traffic especially is expected, very naturally, to be 
lighter after the canal is opened. Already that por- 
tion from the Chagres to the Atlantic had been put 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 99 

in use — on February fifteenth, to be exact ; and the 
time was not far off when the section within our dis- 
trict — from Gamboa to Pedro Miguel — would 
also be in operation. 

That portion runs through the wilderness a mile 
or more back from the canal, through jungled hills 
so dense with vegetation one could only make one's 
way through it with the ubiquitous machete of the 
native jungle-dweller, except where tiny trails appear 
that lead to squatters' thatched huts thrown to- 
gether of tin, dynamite, and dry-goods boxes and 
jungle reeds in little scattered patches of clearing. 
Some of these hills have been cut half away for the 
new line — great generous " cuts," for to the giant 
90-ton steam-shovels a few hundred cubic yards of 
earth more or less is of slight importance. All else 
is virtually impenetrable jungle. Travelers by rail 
across the Isthmus, as no doubt many ships' pas- 
sengers will be in the years to come while their 
steamer is being slowly raised and lowered to and 
from the eighty-five-foot lake, will see little of the 
canal, — a glimpse of the Bas Obispo " cut " at 
Gamboa and little else from the time they leave 
Gatun till they return to the present line at Pedro 
Miguel station. But in compensation they will see 
some wondrous jungle scenery, — a tangled tropical 
wilderness with great masses of bush flowers of bril- 
liant hues, gigantic ferns, countless palm and 
banana trees, wonderfully slender arrow-straight 



100 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

trees rising smooth and branchless more than a hun- 
dred feet to end in an immense bouquet of brilliant 
purplish-hue blossoms. 

" The boss " barely noticed these things. One 
quickly grows accustomed to them. Why, Americans 
who have been down on the Zone for a year don't know 
there 's a palm-tree on the Isthmus — or at least 
they do not remember there were no palm-trees in 
Keokuk, Iowa, when they left there. 

Along this new-graveled line, still unused except 
by work-trains, we rode in our six negro-power car, 
dropping off in the gravel each time we caught sight 
of any species of human being. Every little way 
was a gang, averaging some thirty men, distinct in 
nationality, — Antiguans shoveling gravel, Mar- 
tiniques snarling and quarreling as they wallowed 
thigh-deep in swamps and pools, a company of 
Greeks unloading train-loads of ties, Spaniards 
leisurely but steadily grading and surfacing, track 
bands of " Spigoties " chopping away the aggres- 
sive jungle with their machetes — the one task at 
which the native Panamanian (or Colombian, as 
many still call themselves) is worth his brass-check. 
Every here and there we caught labor's odds and 
ends, diminutive " water-boys," likewise of varying 
nationality, a negro switch-boy dozing under the 
bit of shelter he had rigged up of jungle ferns, 
frightening many a black laborer speechless as we 
pounced upon him emerging from his " soldiering " 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 101 

in the jungle; occasionally even a native bushman on 
his way to market from his palm-thatched home gen- 
erations old back in the bush, who has scarcely no- 
ticed yet that the canal is being dug, fell into our 
hands and was inexorably set down in spite of all 
protest unless he could prove beyond question that 
he had already been " taken " or lived beyond the 
Zone line. 

Thus we scribbled incessantly on, even through the 
noon hour, dragging gangs one by one away from 
their tasks, shaking laborers out of the brief after- 
lunch siesta in a patch of shade. " The boss " was 
hampered by having only two languages where ten 
were needed. In the early afternoon he went on to 
Paraiso to feed himself and the traction power, while 
I held the fort. Soon after rain fell, a sort of ad- 
vance agent of the rainy season, a sudden tropical 
downpour that ran in rivulets down across the pink 
card-boards and my victims. Yet strange to note, 
the writing of the medium soft pencil remained as 
clear and unsmudged as in the driest weather, and 
so clean a rain was it that it did not even soil my 
white cotton shirt. I continued unheeding, only to 
note with surprise a few minutes later that the sun 
was shining on the dense green jungle about me as 
brilliantly as ever and that I was dry again as when 
I had set out in the morning. 

" The boss " returned, and when I had eaten the 
crackers and the bottle of pink lemonade he brought, 



102 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

we pushed on toward the Pacific. Till at length in 
mid-afternoon we came to the top of the descent to 
Pedro Miguel and knew that the end of our district 
was at hand. So powerful was the breeze from the 
Atlantic that our six man-power engine sweated pro- 
fusely as they toiled against it, even on the down- 
grade of the return to Empire. 

To " Scotty " had been assigned my Empire " re- 
calls " and I had been given a new and virgin terri- 
tory, — namely, the town of Paraiso. It lies " some- 
what back from the village street," that is, the P. 
It. R. Indeed, trains do not deign to notice its 
existence except on Sundays. But there is the 
temporary bridge over the canal which few engineers 
venture to " snake her across " at any great speed, 
and the enumerator housed in Empire need not even 
be a graduate " hobo " to be able to drop off there 
a bit after seven in the morning and prance away 
up the chamois path into the town. 

Wherever on the Zone you espy a town of two- 
story skeleton screened buildings scattered over hills, 
with winding gravel roads and trees and flowers be- 
tween there you may be sure live American " gold " 
employees. Yet somehow the Canal Commission had 
dodged the monotony you expected, somehow they 
have broken up the grim lines that make so dismal 
the best-intentioned factory town. There are hints 
that the builders have heard somewhere of the science 
of landscape gardening. At times these same houses 




» * J 




'Toward noon the labor-train screamed in' 




Laborers hurrying to the mess-hall 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 105 

are deceiving, for all I. C. C. buildings bear a strong 
family resemblance, and it is only at the door that 
you know whether it is bachelors' quarters, a family 
residence, or the supreme court. 

From the outside world " P'reeso " scarcely draws 
a glance of attention ; but once in it you find a whole 
Zone town with all the accustomed paraphernalia of 
I. C. C. hotel and commissary, hospital and police 
station, all ruled over and held in check by the 
famous " Colonel " in command of the latter. More- 
over Paraiso will some day come again into her own, 
when the " relocation " opens and brings her back 
on the main line, while proud Culebra and haughty 
Empire, stranded on a railless shore of the canal, 
will wither and waste away and even their broad 
macadamed roads will sink beneath a second-growth 
jungle. 

Renson had come to lend assistance. He set to 
work among the negro cabins, the upper gallery 
seats of Paraiso's amphitheater of hills, for Renson 
had been a free agent for more than a month now 
and was not exactly in a condition to interview Amer- 
ican housewives. My own task began down at the 
row of inhabited box-cars, and so on through shacks 
and tenements with many Spanish laborers' wives. 
Then toward noon the labor-train screamed in, with 
two " gold " coaches and many open cattle-cars with 
long benches jammed with sweaty workmen, easily 
six hundred men in the six cars, who swept in upon 



106 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

the town like a flood through a suddenly opened 
sluiceway as the train barely paused and shrieked 
away again. 

Renson and I dashed for the laborers' mess-halls, 
where hundreds of sun-bronzed foreigners, divided 
only as to color, packed pell-mell around a score 
of wooden tables heavily stocked with rough and 
tumble food — yet so different from the old French 
catch as catch can days when each man owned his 
black pot and toiled all through the noon-hour to 
cook himself an unsanitary lunch. We jotted them 
down at express speed, with changes of tongue so 
abrupt that our heads were soon reeling, and in the 
place where our minds should have been sounded 
only a confused chaotic uproar like a wrangling with- 
in the covers of a polyglot dictionary. Then sud- 
denly I landed a Russian ! It was the final straw. 
I like to speak Spanish, I can endure the creaking 
of Turks attempting to talk Italian, I can bend an 
ear to the excruciating " French " of Martinique 
negroes, I have boldly faced sputtering Arabs, but 
I will not run the risk of talking Russian. It was 
the second and last case during my census days when 
I was forced to call for interpretative assistance. 

At best we caught only a small percentage at each 
table before the crowd had wolfed and melted away. 
An odd half-dozen more, perhaps, we found stretched 
out in the shade under the mess-hall and neighbor- 
ing quarters before the imperative screech of the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 107 

labor-train whistle ended a scene that must be sev- 
eral times repeated, and now left us silent and alone, 
to wander wet and weary to the nearest white bach- 
elor quarters, there to lie on our backs an hour or 
more till the polyglot jumble of words in the back of 
our heads had each climbed again to its proper shelf. 
Speaking of white bachelor quarters, therein lay 
the enumerator's greatest problem. The Spaniard 
or the Jamaican is in nine cases out of ten fluently 
familiar with his companion's antecedents and pedi- 
gree. He can generally furnish all the informa- 
tion the census department calls for. But it is 
quite otherwise with the American bachelor. He 
may know his room-mate 's exact degree of skill at 
poker, he probably knows his private opinion of " the 
Colonel," he is sure to know his degree of enmity to 
the prohibition movement ; but he is not at all certain 
to know his name and rarely indeed has he the shadow 
of a notion when and in what particular corner of 
the States he began the game of existence. So loose 
are ties down on the Zone that a man 's room-mate 
might go off into the jungle and die and the former 
not dream of inquiring for him for a week. Espe- 
cially we world-wanderers, as are a large percentage 
of " Zoners," with virtually no fixed roots in any 
soil, floating wherever the job suggests or the spirit 
moves, have the facts of our past in our own heads 
only. No wanderer of experience would dream of 
asking his fellow where he came from. The answer 



108 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

would be too apt to be, " from the last place." So 
difficult did this matter become that I gave up rush- 
ing for the bus to Pedro Miguel each evening and 
the even more distressing necessity of catching that 
premature 6:30 train each morning in Empire and, 
packing a sheet and pillow and tooth-brush, moved 
down to Paraiso that I might spend the first half 
of the night in quest of these elusive bits of bachelor 
information. 

Meanwhile the enrolling by day continued un- 
abated. I had my first . experience enumerating 
" gold " married quarters — white American fami- 
lies; just enough for experience and not enough to 
suffer severely. The enrolling of West Indians was 
pleasanter. The wives of locomotive engineers and 
steam-shovel cranemen were not infrequently super- 
cilious ladies who resented being disturbed during 
their " social functions " and lacked the training in 
politeness of Jamaican " mammies." Living in 
Paradise now under a paternal all-providing govern- 
ment, they seemed to have forgotten the rolling-pin 
days of the past. 

It was here in Paraiso that I first encountered 
that strange, that wondrous strange custom of ly- 
ing about one's age. Negro women never did. 
What more absurd, uncalled-for piece of dishonesty! 
Does Mrs. Smith fear that Mrs. Jones next door 
will succeed in pumping out of me that capital bit 
of information? Little does she know the long 




Some of the ''Enumerated' 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 111 

prison sentence at " hard labor " that stares me in 
the face for any such slip ; to say nothing of my 
naturally incommunicative disposition. Or is she 
ashamed to let me know the truth? — unaware that 
all such information goes in at my ears and down 
my pencil to the pink card before me like a message 
over the wires, leaving no more trace behind. Surely 
she must know that I care not a pencil-point whether 
she is eighteen or fifty-two, nor remember which one 
minute after her screen door has slammed behind 
me — unless she has caused me to glance up in won- 
der at her silvering temples of thirty-five when she 
simpers " twenty-two " — and to set her down as 
forty to be on the safe side. Oh now, please, ladies, 
do not understand me as accusing the American 
wives of Paraiso in general of this weakness. The 
large majority were quite pleasant, frank, and over- 
flowing with cheery good sense. But the percentage 
who were not was far larger than I, who am also 
an American, was pleased to find it. 

But doubly astonishing were the few cases of 
lying by proxy. A 6S clean-cut,' 9 college-graduated 
civil engineer of thirty-two whom one would have 
cited as an example of the best type of American, 
gave all data concerning himself in an unimpeach- 
able manner. His wife was absent. When the ques- 
tion of her age arose he gave it, with the slightest 
catch in his voice, as twenty. Now that might be 
all very well. Men of thirty-two are occasionally so 



112 ZONE POLICEMAN 8& 

fortunate as to marry girls of twenty. But a mo- 
ment later the gentleman in question finds himself 
announcing that his wife has been living on the Zone 
with him since 1907; and that she was born in New 
England! Thus is he tripped over his own clothes- 
line. For New England girls do not marry at fif- 
teen; mother would not let them even if they would. 

I, too, had gradually worked my way high up 
among the nondescript cabins on the upper rim 
of Paraiso that seem on the very verge of pitching 
headlong into the noisy, smoky canal far below with 
the jar of the next explosion, when one sunny mid- 
afternoon I caught sight of Renson dejectedly 
trudging down across what might be called the 
" Maiden " of Paraiso, back of the two-story lodge- 
hall. I took leave of my ebony hostess and de- 
scended. Renson 's troubles were indeed dishearten- 
ing. Back in the jungled fringe of the town he had 
fallen into a swarm of Martiniques, and Renson 's 
French being nothing more than an unstudied mix- 
ture of English and Spanish, he had not gathered 
much information. Moreover negro women from 
the French isles are enough to frighten any virtuous 
young Marine. 

" What 's the sense o' me tryin' to chew the fat 
in French?" asked Renson, with tears in his voice. 
" I ain't in no condition to work at this census busi- 
ness any longer anyway. I ain't got to bed before 
three in the morning this week " — in his air was 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 113 

open suggestion that it was some one else's fault — 
" Some day I '11 be gettin' in bad, too. This mornin' 
a fool nigger woman asked me if I did n't want her 
black pickaninny I was enumerating thinkin' it was 
a good joke. You know how these bush kids is 
runnin' around all over the country before a white 
man's brat could walk on its hind legs. ' Yes,' I 
says, * if I was goin' alligator huntin' an' needed 
bait ! ' I come near catchin' the brat up by the feet 
an' beatin' its can off. I 'm out o' luck any way, 
an'—" " 

The fact is Renson was aching to be " fired." 
More than thirty days had he been subject only to 
his own will, and it was high time he returned to the 
nursery discipline of camp. Moreover he was out 
of cigarettes. I slipped him one and smoothed him 
down as its fumes grew — for Renson was as tract- 
able as a child, rightly treated — and set him to 
taking Jamaican tenements in the center of town, 
while I struck off into the jungled Martinique hills 
myself. 

There were signs abroad that the census job was 
drawing to a close. My first pay-day had already 
come and gone and I had strolled up the gravel walk 
one noon-day to the Disembursing Office with my yel- 
low pay certificate duly initialed by the examiner 
of accounts, and was handed my first four twenty- 
dollar gold pieces — for hotel and commissary books 
sadly reduce a good paycheck. Already one evening 



114 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

I had entered the census office to find " the boss " 
just peeling off his sweat-dripping undershirt and 
dotted with skin-pricking jungle life after a day 
mule-back on the thither side of the canal ; an utterly 
fruitless day, for not only had he failed during eight 
hours of plunging through the wilderness to find a 
single hut not already decorated with the " enumer- 
ated " tag, but not even a banana could he lay hands 
on when the noon-hour overhauled him far from the 
ministrations of " Ben " and the breeze-swept ver- 
anda of Empire hotel. 

It was, I believe, the afternoon following Renson's 
linguistic troubles that "the boss" came jogging 
into Paraiso on his sturdy mule. In his eagerness 
to " clean up " the territory we fell to corraling 
negroes everywhere, in the streets, at work, buying 
their supplies at the commissary, sleeping in the 
shade of wayside trees, anywhere and everywhere, 
until at last in his excitement " the boss " let his 
medium soft pencil slip by the column for color and 
dashed down the abbreviation for " mixed " after the 
question, " Married or Single ? " Which may have 
been near enough the truth of the case, but sug- 
gested it was time to quit. So we marked Paraiso 
" finished except for recalls " and returned to Em- 
pire. 

One by one our fellow-enumerators had dropped 
by the wayside, some by mutual agreement, some 
without any agreement whatever. Renson was now 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 115 

relieved from census duty, to his great joy, 
there remained but four of us, — " the boss " and 
"Mac" in the office, " Scotty " and I outside. 
A deep conference ensued and, as if I had not 
had good luck enough already, it was decided that 
we two should go through the " cut " itself. It 
was like offering us a salary to view all the Great 
Work in detail, for virtually all the excavation of 
any importance on the Zone lay within the confines 
of our district. 

So one day " Scotty " and I descended at the 
girderless railroad bridge and, taking each one side 
of the canal, set out to canvass its every nook and 
cranny. The canal as it then stood was about the 
width of two city blocks, an immense chasm piled and 
tumbled with broken rock and earth, in the center a 
ditch already filled with grimy water, on either side 
several levels of rough rock ledges with sheer rugged 
stone faces ; for the hills were being cut away in layers 
each far above the other. High above us rose the 
jagged walls of the " cut " with towns hanging by 
their fingernails all along its edge, and ahead in the 
abysmal, smoky distance the great channel gashed 
through Culebra mountain. 

The different levels varied from ten to twenty feet 
one above the other, each with a railroad on it, back 
and forth along which incessantly rumbled and 
screeched dirt-trains full or empty, halting before the 
steam-shovels, that shivered and spouted thick black 



116 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

smoke as they ate away the rocky hills and cast them 
in great giant handsful on the train of one-sided flat- 
cars that moved forward bit by bit at the flourish 
of the conductor's yellow flag. Steam-shovels that 
seemed human in all except their mammoth fearless 
strength tore up the solid rock with snorts of rage 
and the panting of industry, now and then flinging 
some troublesome, stubborn boulder angrily upon 
the cars. Yet they could be dainty as human fingers 
too, could pick up a railroad spike or push a rock 
gently an inch further across the car. Each was 
run by two white Americans, or at least what would 
prove such when they reached the shower-bath in 
their quarters — the craneman far out on the shovel 
arm, the engineer within the machine itself with a 
labyrinth of levers demanding his unbroken atten- 
tion. Then there was of course a gang of negroes, 
firemen and the like, attached to each shovel. 

All the day through I climbed and scrambled back 
and forth between the different levels, dodging from 
one track to another and along the rocky floor of 
the canal, needing eyes and ears both in front and 
behind, not merely for trains but for a hundred hid- 
den and unknown dangers to keep the nerves taut. 
Now and then a palatial motorcar, like some rail- 
road breed of taxi, sped by with its musical insistent 
jingling bells, usually with one of the countless par- 
ties of government guests or tourists in spotless 
white which the dry season brings. Dirt-trains kept 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 117 

the right of way, however, for the Work always comes 
first at Panama. Or it might be the famous " yel- 
low ear " itself with members of the Commission. 
Once it came all but empty and there dropped off 
inconspicuously a man in baggy duck trousers, a 
black alpaca coat of many wrinkles ; and an unas- 
suming straw hat, a white-haired man with blue — 
almost babyish blue-eyes, a cigarette dangling from 
his lips as he strolled about with restless yet quiet 
energy. There has been no flash and glitter of 
military uniforms on the Zone since the French sailed 
for home, but every one knew " the Colonel " for all 
that, the soldier who has never " seen service," who 
has never heard the shrapnel scream by overhead, 
yet to whom the world owes more thanks than six 
conquering generals rolled into one. 

Scores of " trypod " and " Star " drills, whole 
battalions of deafening machines run by compressed 
air brought from miles away, are pounding and 
grinding and jamming holes in the living rock. 
After them will presently come nonchalantly stroll- 
ing along gangs of the ubiquitous black " powder- 
men " and carelessly throw down boxes of dynamite 
and pound the drill-holes full thereof and tamp them 
down ready to "blow" at 11:30 and 5:30 when 
the workmen are out of range, — those mighty ex- 
plosions that twelve times a week set the porch chairs 
of every I. C. C. house on the Isthmus to rocking, and 
are heard far out at sea. 



118 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Anywhere near the drills is such a roaring and 
jangling that I must bellow at the top of my voice 
to be heard at all. The entire gamut of sound-waves 
surrounds and enfolds me, and with it all the power- 
ful Atlantic breeze sweeps deafeningly through the 
channel. Down in the bottom of the canal if one 
step behind anything that shuts off the breeze it is 
tropically hot ; yet up on the edge of the chasm above, 
the trees are always nodding and bowing before the 
ceaseless wind from off the Caribbean. Scores of 
" switcheros " drowse under their sheet-iron wigwams, 
erected not so much as protection from the sun, for 
the drowsers are mostly negroes and immune to that, 
as from young rocks that the dynamite blasts fre- 
quently toss a quarter-mile. Then over it all hang 
heavy clouds of soft-coal dust from trains and 
shovels, shifting down upon the black, white and 
mixed, and the enumerator alike; a dirty, noisy, 
perilous, enjoyable job. 

Everywhere are gangs of men, sometimes two or 
three gangs working together at the same task. 
Shovel gangs, track gangs, surfacing gangs, dyna- 
mite gangs, gangs doing everything imaginable with 
shovel and pick and crowbar, gangs down on the 
floor of the canal, gangs far up the steep walls of 
cut rock, gangs stretching away in either direction 
till those far off look like upright bands of the leaf- 
cutting ants of Panamanian jungles ; gangs nearly 
all, whatever their nationality, in the blue shirts and 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 119 

khaki trousers of the Zone commissary, giving a 
peculiar color scheme to all the scene. 

Now and then the boss is a stony-eyed American 
with a black cigar clamped between his teeth. More 
often he is of the same nationality as the workers, 
quite likely from the same town, who jabbers a little 
imitation English. Which is one of the reasons 
why a force of " time inspectors " is constantly 
dodging in and out over the Job, time-book and 
pencil in hand, lest some fellow-townsman of the boss 
be earning his $1.50 a day under the shade of a tree 
back in the jungle. Here are Basques in their 
bomas, preferring their native " Euscarra " to Span- 
ish ; French " niggers " and English " niggers " 
whom it is to the interest of peace and order to keep 
as far apart as possible ; occasionally a few sun- 
burned blond men in a shovel gang, but they prove 
to be Teutons or Scandinavians; laborers of every 
color and degree — except American laborers, more 
than conspicuous by their absence. For the Amer- 
ican negro is an untractable creature in large num- 
bers, and the caste system that forbids white Amer- 
icans from engaging in common labor side by side 
with negroes is to be expected in an enterprise of 
which the leaders are not only military men but 
largely southerners, however many may be shiver- 
ing in the streets of Chicago or roaming hungrily 
through the byways of St. Louis. It is well so, per- 
haps. None of us who feels an affection for the Zone 



120 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

would wish to see its atmosphere lowered from what 
it is to the brutal depths of our railroad construc- 
tion camps in the States. 

The attention of certain state legislatures might 
advantageously be called to the Zone Spaniard's 
drinking-cup. It is really a tin can on the end of 
a long stick, cover and all. The top is punched 
sieve-like that the water may enter as it is dipped 
in the bucket with which the water-boy strains along. 
In the bottom is a single small hole out of which 
spurts into the drinker's mouth a little stream of 
water as he holds it high above his head, as once he 
drank wine from his leather bota in far-off Spain. 
Many a Spanish gang comes entirely from the same 
town, notably Salamanca or Avila. I set them to 
staring and chattering by some simple remark about 
their birthplace : " Fine view from the Paseo del 
Rastro, eh?" "Does the puente romano still cross 
the river? " But I had soon to cease such personali- 
ties, for picks and shovels lay idle as long as I re- 
mained in sight and Uncle Sam was the loser. 

So many were the gangs that I advanced barely 
a half-mile during this first day and, lost in my 
work, forgot the hour until it was suddenly recalled 
by the insistent, strident tooting of whistles that 
forewarns the setting-off of the dynamite charges 
from the little red electric boxes along the edge of the 
" cut." I turned back toward Paraiso and, all but 
stumbling over little red-wound wires everywhere on 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 121 

the ground, dodging in and out, running forward, 
halting or suddenly retreating, I worked my way 
gradually forward, while all the world about me was 
upheaving and spouting and belching forth to 
the heavens, as if I had been caught in the crater 
of a volcano as it suddenly erupted without warn- 
ing. 

The history of Panama is strewn with " dynamite 
stories." Even the French had theirs in their six- 
teen per cent, of the excavation of Culebra ; in Amer- 
ican annals there is one for every week. Three days 
before, one of my Empire friends set off one after- 
noon for a stroll through the " cut " he had not seen 
for a year. In a retired spot he came upon two 
negroes pounding an irregular bundle. " What you 
doing, boys ? " he inquired with idle curiosity. 
" Jes' a breakin' up dis yere dynamite, boss," lan- 
guidly answered one of the blacks. My friend was 
one of those apprehensive, over-cautious fellows so 
rare on the Zone. Without so much as taking his 
leave he set off at a run. Some two car-lengths be- 
yond an explosion pitched him forward and all but 
lifted him off his feet. When he looked back the 
negroes had left. Indeed neither of them has re- 
ported for work since. 

Then there was " Mac's " case. In his ambition 
for census efficiency " Mac " was in the habit of 
stopping workmen wherever he met them. One day 
he encountered a Jamaican carrying a box of dyna- 



122 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

mite on his head and, according to his custom, 
shouted : 

" Hey, boy ! Had your census taken yet ? " 

w What dat, boss ? " cried the Jamaican with wide- 
open eyes, as he threw the box at " Mac's " feet and 
stood at respectful attention. 

Somehow " Mac " lacked a bit of his old zealous- 
ness thereafter. 

On the second day I pushed past Cucaracha, scene 
of the greatest " slide " in the history of the canal 
when forty-seven acres went into the " cut," bury- 
ing under untold tons of earth and rock steam- 
shovels and railroads, " Star " and " trypod " drills, 
and all else in sight — except the " rough-necks," 
who are far too fast on their feet to be buried against 
their will. One by one I dragged shovel gangs away 
to a distance where my shouting could be heard, one 
by one I commanded drillmen to shut off their deafen- 
ing machines, all day I dodged switching, snorting 
trains, clambered by steep rocky paths, or ladders 
from one level to another, howling above the roar of 
the " cut " the time-worn questions, straining my 
ear to catch the answer. Many a negro did not 
know the meaning of the word " census," and must 
have it explained to him in words of one syllable. 
Many a time I climbed to some lofty rock ledge lined 
with drills and, gesticulating like a semaphore in 
signal practice, caught at last the wandering atten- 
tion of a negro, to shout sore-throated above the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 123 

incessant pounding of machines and the roaring of 
the Atlantic breeze: 

" Hello, boy ! Census taken yet ? " 

A long vacant stare, then at last, perhaps, the 
answer : 

" Oh, yes sah, boss." 

" When and where ? " 

" In Spanish Town, Jamaica, three year ago, 
sah." 

Which was not an attempt to be facetious but an 
answer in all seriousness. Why should not one cen- 
sus, like one baptism, suffice for a life-time? It was 
fortunate that enumerators were not accustomed to 
carry deadly weapons. 

Quick changes from negro to Spanish gangs dem- 
onstrated beyond all future question how much more 
native intelligence has the white man. Rarely did 
I need to ask a Spaniard a question twice, still less 
ask him to repeat the answer. His replies came back 
sharp and swift as a pelota from a cesta. West In- 
dians not only must hear the question an average 
of three times but could seldom give the simplest 
information clearly enough to be intelligible, though 
ostensibly speaking English. A Spanish card one 
might fill out and be gone in less time than the negro 
could be roused from his racial torpor. Yet of the 
Spaniards on the Zone surely seventy per cent, were 
wholly illiterate, while the negroes from the British 
West Indies, thanks to their good fortune in being 



1U ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

ruled over by the world's best colonist, could almost 
invariably read and write; many of those shoveling 
in the " cut " have been trained in trigonometry. 

Few are the " Zoners " now who do not consider 
the Spaniard the best workman ever imported in all 
the sixty-five years from the railroad surveying to 
the completion of the canal. The stocky, muscle- 
bound little fellows come no longer to America as 
conquist adores, but to shovel dirt. And yet 
more cheery, willing workers, more law-abiding sub- 
jects are scarcely to be found. It is unfortunate we 
could not have imported Spaniards for all the canal 
work; even they have naturally learned some 
" soldiering " from the example of lazy negroes who, 
where laborers must be had, are a bit better than 
no labor — though not much. 

The third day came, and high above me towered 
the rock cliffs of Culebra's palm-crowned hill, steam- 
shovels approaching the summit in echelon, here and 
there an incipient earth and rock " slide " dribbling 
warningly down. He who still fancies the digging 
of the canal an ordinary task should have tramped 
with us through just our section, halting to speak 
to every man in it, climbing out of this man-made 
canon twice a day, a strenuous climb even near its 
ends, while at Culebra one looks up at all but un- 
scalable mountain walls on either side. 

From time to time we hear murmurs from abroad 
that Americans are making light of catastrophies on 




A Gang of Greeks 




An I. C. C. free public school for non-whites 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 127 

the Isthmus, that they cover up their great disasters 
by a strict censorship of news. The latter is mere 
absurdity. As to catastrophies, a great " slide " 
or a premature dynamite explosion are serious dis- 
aster to Americans on the job just as they would 
be to Europeans. But whereas the continental 
European would sit down before the misfortune and 
weep, the American swears a round oath, spits on 
his hands, and pitches in to shovel the " slide " out 
again. He is n't belittling the disasters ; it is merely 
that he knows the canal has got to be dug and &oes 
ahead and digs it. That is the greatest thing on the 
Zone. Amid all the childish snarling of " Spigo- 
ties," the back-biting of Europe, the congressional 
wrangles, the Cabinet politics, the man on the job, — 
" the Colonel," the average American, the " rough- 
neck " — goes right on digging the canal day by 
day as if he had never heard a rumor of all this 
outside noise. 

Mighty is the Job from one point of view; yet 
tiny from another. With all his enormous equip- 
ment, his peerless ingenuity, and his feverish activity 
all little man has succeeded in doing is to scratch a 
little surface wound in Mother Earth, cutting open a 
few superficial veins, of water, that trickle down the 
rocky face of the " cut." 

By March twelfth we had carried our task past 
and under Empire suspension bridge, and the end of 
the " cut " was almost in sight. That day I clawed 



128 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

and scrambled a score of times up the face of rock 
walls. I zigzagged through long rows of negroes 
pounding holes in rock ledges. I stumbled and 
splashed my way through gangs of Martinique 
" muckers." I slid down the face of government- 
made cliffs on the seat of my commissary breeches. 
I fought my way up again to stalk through long 
lines of men picking away at the dizzy edge of sheer 
precipices. I rolled down in the sand and rubble of 
what threatened to develop into iC slides." I crawled 
under snorting steam-shovels to drag out besooted 
negroes — negroes so besooted I had to ask them 
their color — while dodging the gigantic swinging 
shovel itself, to say nothing of " dhobie " blasts and 
rocks of the size of drummers' trunks that spilled 
from it as it swung. I climbed up into the quivering 
monster itself to interrupt the engineer at his levers, 
to shout at the craneman on his beam. I sprang 
aboard every train that was not running at full 
speed, walking along the running-board into the cab ; 
if not to " get " the engineer at least to gain new 
life from his private ice-water tank. I scrambled 
over tenders and quarter-miles of " Lidgerwood 
flats " piled high with broken rock and earth, to 
scream at the American conductor and his black 
brakemen, often to find myself, by the time I had set 
down one of them, carried entirely out of my dis- 
trict, to Pedro Miguel or beyond the Chagres, and 
have to " hit the grit " in " hobo " fashion and catch 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 129 

something back to the spot where I left off. In 
short I poked into every corner of the " cut " known 
to man, bawling in the November-first voice of a 
presidential candidate to everything in trousers; 

" Eh ! 'Ad yer census taken yet ? " 

And what was my reward? From the northern 
edge of Empire to where the " cut " sinks away into 
the Chagres and the low, flat country beyond, I en- 
rolled — just thirteen persons. It was then and 
there, though it still lacked an hour of noon, that 
I ceased to be a census enumerator. With slow and 
deliberate step I climbed out of the canal and across 
a pathed field to Bas Obispo and, sitting down in 
the shade of her station, patiently awaited the train 
that would carry me back to Empire. 

Four thousand, six hundred and seventy-seven 
Zone residents had I enrolled during those six weeks. 
Something over half of these were Jamaicans. Of 
the states Pennsylvania was best represented. 
Martinique negroes, Greeks, Spaniards, and Pana- 
manians were some eighty per cent, illiterate ; of some 
three hundred of the first only a half dozen even 
claimed to read and write; and non-wedlock was 
virtually universal among them. 

Rumor has it that there are seventy-two separate 
states and dependencies represented on the Isthmus. 
My own cards showed a few less. Most conspicuous 
absences, besides American negroes, were natives of 
Honduras, of four countries of South America, of 



130 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

most of Africa, and of entire Australia. That this 
was largely due to chance was shown by the fact that 
my fellow-enumerators found persons from all these 
countries. 

I had enrolled persons born in the following places : 
All the United States except three or four states 
in the far northwest ; Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, 
Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Canal 
Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, British Guinea (De- 
marara), French and Dutch Guinea, Ecuador, Peru, 
Bolivia and Chile. Cuba, Hayti and Santo 
Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Vincent, Trinidad, 
Saint Lucia, Montserrat, Dominica, Nevis, Nassau, 
Eleuthera and Inagua, Martinique, Guadalupe, Saint 
Thomas (Danish West Indies), Curacao and Tobago. 
England, Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Finland, 
Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, France, 
Spain, Andorra, Portugal, Switzerland, Germany, 
Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Servia, Turkey, 
Canary Islands. Syria, Palestine, Arabia, India 
(from Tuticorin to Lahore), China, Japan, Egypt, 
Sierra Leon, South Africa and — the High Seas. 

"Where you born, boy?" I had run across a 
wrinkled old negro who had worked more than thirty 
years for the P. R. R. 

" 'Deed ah d5n' know, boss," 

" Oh, come ! Don't know where you were born ? " 
" Fo' Gawd, boss, ah 's tellin' yo de truff. Ah 
don know, 'cause ah born to sea." 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 131 

"Well, what country are you a subject of?" 

" Truly ah cahn't say, boss." 

" Well what nationality was your father ? " 

" Ah neveh see him, sail." 

" Well then where the devil did you first land after 
you were born? " 

" 'Deed ah cahn't say, boss. T'ink it were one 
o' dem islands. Reckon ah 's a subjec' o' de' worl', 
boss." 

Weeks afterward the population of Uncle Sam's 
ten by fifty-mile strip of tropics was found to have 
been on February first, 1912, 62,810. No, anxious 
reader, I am not giving away inside information ; the 
source of my remarks is the public prints. Of these 
about 25,000 were British subjects (West Indian 
negroes with very few exceptions). Of the entire 
population 37,428 were employed by the U. S. gov- 
ernment. Of white Americans, of the Brahmin caste 
of the " gold " roll, there were employed on the 
Zone but 5,228, 



CHAPTER V 

POLICE headquarters presented an unusual air 
of preoccupation next morning. In the cor- 
ner office the telephone rang often and imperatively, 
several times erect figures in khaki and broad 
" Texas " hats flashed by the doorway, the drone of 
earnest conference sounded a few minutes, and the 
figures flashed as suddenly out again into the world. 
In the inner office I glanced once more in review 
through the " Rules and Regulations." The Zone, 
too, was now familiar ground, and as for the third 
requirement for a policeman — to know the Zone 
residents by sight — a strange face brought me a 
start of surprise, unless it beamed above the garb 
that shouted " tourist." Now all I needed was a 
few hours of conference and explanation on the 
duties, rights, and privileges of policemen ; and that 
of course would come as soon as leisure again settled 
down over headquarters. 

Musing which I was suddenly startled to my feet 
by " the Captain " appearing in the doorway. 

" Catch the next train to Balboa ; " he said. 

" You *ve got four minutes. You '11 find Lieutenant 

132 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 133 

Long on board. Here are the people to look out 
for." 

He thrust into my hands a slip of paper, from 
another direction there was tossed at me a new brass- 
check and " First-Class Private " police badge No. 
88, and I was racing down through Ancon. In the 
meadow below the Tivoli I risked time to glance at 
the slip of paper. On it were the names of an ex- 
president and two ministers of a frowsy little South 
American republic during whose rule a former presi- 
dent and his henchmen had been brutally mur- 
dered by a popular uprising in the very capital 
itself. 

In the first-class coach I found Lieutenant Long, 
towering so far above all his surroundings as to have 
been easily recognized even had he not been in uni- 
form. Beside him sat Corporal Castillo of the 
" plain-clothes " squad, a young man of forty, 
with a high forehead, a stubby black mustache, 
and a chin that was decisive without being aggres- 
sive. 

" Now here 's the Captain's idea," explained the 
Lieutenant, as the train swung away around Ancon 
hill, " We '11 have to take turns mounting guard over 
them, of course. I '11 have to talk Spanish, and no- 
body 'd have to look at Castillo more than once to 
know he was born up in some crack in the Andes." — 
Which was one of the Lieutenant's jokes, for the 
Corporal, though a Colombian, was as white, sharp- 



134 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

witted, and energetic as any American on the Zone. 
— " But no one to look at him would suspect that 
Fr — French, is it?" 

« Franck." 

" Oh, yes, that Franck could speak Spanish. 
We '11 do our best to inflate that impression, and 
when it comes your turn at guard-mount you can 
probably let several little things of interest drift in 
at your ears." 

" I left headquarters before the Captain had time 
to explain," I suggested. 

" Oh ! " said the Lieutenant. " Well, here it is in 
a spectacle-case, as our friend Kipling would put it. 
We 're on our way to Culebra Island. There are 
now in quarantine there three men who arrived yes- 
terday from South America. They are members of 
the party of the murdered president. To-day there 
will arrive and also be put in hock the three gents 
whose names you have there. Now we have a pri- 
vate inside hunch that the three already here have 
come up particularly and specifically to prepare for 
funeral the three that are arriving. Which is no 
hair off our brows, except it 's up to us to see they 
don't pull off any little stunts of that kind on Zone 
territory." 

At least this police business was starting well; if 
this was a sample it would be a real job. 

The train had stopped and we were climbing the 
steps of Balboa police station; for without the co- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 135 

operation of the " Admiral of the Pacific Fleet " 
we could not reach Culebra Island. 

"By the way, I suppose you're well armed?" 
asked the Lieutenant in his high querulous voice, as 
we drank a last round of ice-water preparatory to 
setting out again. 

" Em — I 've got a fountain pen," I replied. " I 
have n't been a policeman twenty minutes yet, and I 
was appointed in a hurry." 

" Fine ! " cried " the Admiral " sarcastically, 
snatching open the door of a closet beside the desk. 
"With a warm job like this on hand! You know 
what these South Americans are — " with a wink at 
the Lieutenant that was meant also for Castillo, who 
stood with his felt hat on the back of his head and 
a far-away look in his eyes. 

" Yah, mighty dangerous — around meal time," 
said the Corporal; though at the same time he drew 
from a hip pocket a worn leather holster containing 
a revolver, and examined it intently. 

Meanwhile " the Admiral " had handed me a mas- 
sive No. 38 " Colt " with holster, a box of cartridges, 
and a belt that might easily have served as a horse's 
saddle-girth. When I had buckled it on under my 
coat the armament felt like a small boy clinging 
about my waist. 

We trooped on down a sort of railroad junction 
with a score of abandoned wooden houses. It was 
here I had first landed on the Zone one blazing Sun- 



136 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

day nearly two months before and tramped away for 
some miles on a rusty sandy track along a canal al- 
ready filled with water till a short jungle path led 
me into my first Zone town. Already that seemed 
ancient history. 

The police launch, manned by negro prisoners, with 
" the Admiral " in a cushioned arm-chair at the wheel, 
was soon scudding away across the sunlit harbor, the 
breakwater building of the spoil of Culebra " cut " 
on our left, ahead the cluster of small islands being 
torn to pieces for Uncle Sam's fortifications. The 
steamer being not yet sighted, we put in at Naos 
Island, where the bulky policeman in charge led us 
to dinner at the I. C. C. hotel, during which the 
noonday blasting on the Zone came dully across to 
us. Soon after we were landing at the cement side- 
walk of the island — where I had been a prisoner for 
a day in January as my welcome to U. S. territory 
— and were being greeted by the pocket edition 
doctor and the bay-windowed German who had been 
my wardens on that occasion. 

We found the conspirators at a table in a corridor 
of the first-class quarantine station. In the words 
of Lieutenant Long " they fully looked the part," 
being of distinctly merciless cut of jib. They were 
roughly dressed and without collars, convincing proof 
of some nefarious design, for when the Latin- Ameri- 
can entitled to wear them leaves off his white collar 
and his cane he must be desperate indeed. 




r^~ 




Culebra Island, Zone Quarantine Station 




'Across the bay on the lower slope of a long hill drowsed the city of 

Panama" 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 139 

We " braced " them at once, marching down upon 
them as they were murmuring with heads together 
over a mass of typewritten sheets. The Corporal 
was delegated to inform them in his most urbane and 
hidalguezco Castilian that we were well acquainted 
with their errand and that we were come to frustrate 
by any legitimate means in our power the consumma- 
tion of any such project on American territory. 
When the first paralyzed stare of astonishment that 
plans they had fancied locked in their own breasts 
were known to others had somewhat subsided, one of 
them assumed the spokesmanship. In just as courtly 
and superabundant language he replied that they 
were only too well aware of the inadvis ability of 
carrying out any act against its sovereignty on U. 
S. soil; that so long as they were on American 
territory they would conduct themselves in a most 
circumspect and caballeroso manner — " but," he 
concluded, " in the most public street of Panama 
city the first time we meet those three dogs — we 
shall spit in their faces - — that 's all, nada mas," and 
the blazing eyes announced all too plainly what he 
meant by that figure of speech. 

That was all very well, was our smiling and urbane 
reply, but to be on the safe side and merely as a 
matter of custom we were under the unfortunate ne- 
cessity of requesting them to submit to the annoy- 
ance of having their baggage and persons examined 
with a view to discovering what weapons — - 



140 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" Como no seiiores ? All the examination you de- 
sire." Which was exceedingly kind of them. 
Whereupon, when the Lieutenant had interpreted to 
me their permission, we fell upon them and amid 
countless expressions of mutual esteem gave them 
and their baggage such a " frisking " as befalls a 
Kaffir leaving a South African diamond mine, and 
found them armed with — a receipt from the quar- 
antine doctor for " one pearl-handled Smill and Wil- 
son No. 32." Either they really intended to post- 
pone their little affair until they reached Panama, 
or they had succeeded in concealing their weapons 
elsewhere. 

The doctor and his assistant were already being 
rowed out to the steamer that was to bring the vic- 
tims. They were to be lodged in a room across the 
corridor from the conspirators, which corridor it 
would be our simple duty to patrol with a view to 
intercepting any exchange of stray lead. We fell 
to planning such division of the twenty-four hours as 
should give me the most talkative period. The Lieu- 
tenant took the trouble further to convince the trio 
of my total ignorance of Spanish by a distinct and 
elaborate explanation, in English, of the difference 
between the words " muchacho " and " muchacha." 
Then we wandered down past the grimy steerage 
station to the shore end of the little wharf to await 
the doctor and our protegees. 

The ocean breeze swept unhampered across the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 141 

island; on its rocky shore sounded the dull rumble of 
waves, for the sea was rolling a bit now. The swell- 
ing tide covered inch by inch a sandy ridge that con- 
nected us with another island, gradually drowning 
beneath its waters several rusty old hulls. A little 
rocky wooded isle to the left cut off the future en- 
trance to the canal. Some miles away across the 
bay on the lower slope of a long hill drowsed the city 
of Panama in brilliant sunshine; and beyond, the 
hazy mountainous country stretched southwestward 
to be lost in the molten horizon. On a distant hill 
some Indian was burning off a patch of jungle to 
plant his corn. 

Meanwhile the Lieutenant and the Corporal had 
settled some Lombroso proposition and fallen to re- 
citing poetry. The former, who was evidently a 
lover of melancholy, mouth-filling verse, was declaim- 
ing " The Raven " to the open sea. I listened in 
wonder. Was this then police talk? I had expected 
rough, untaught fellows whose conversation at best 
would be pornographic rather than poetic. My 
astonishment swelled to the bursting point when the 
Colombian not only caught up the poem where the 
Lieutenant left off but topped it off with that peer- 
less translation by Bonalde the Venezuelan, begin- 
ning: 

Una fosca media nocfie, cuando en tristes reflexiones 
Sobre mas de un raro inf olio de olvidados cronicones — 



142 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

And just then the quarantine launch swung around 
the neighboring island. I tightened my horse belt 
and dragged the " Colt " around within easy reach ; 
and a moment later the doctor and his bulking un- 
derstudy stepped ashore — alone. 

" They did n't come," said the former ; " they were 
not allowed to leave their own country." 

" Hell and damnation," said the Lieutenant at 
length in a calm, conversational tone of voice, with 
the air of a small boy who has been wantonly robbed 
of a long-promised holiday but who is determined not 
to make a scene over it. The Corporal seemed in- 
different, and stood with the far-away look in his 
eyes as if he were already busy with some other plans 
or worries. But then, the Corporal was married. 
As for myself, I had somehow felt from the first that 
it was too good to be true. Adventure has steadily 
dodged me all my days. 

A half-hour later we were pitching across the bay 
toward Ancon hill, scaled bare on one end by the 
work of fortification like a Hindu hair-cut. The 
water came spitting inboard now and then, and de- 
jected silence reigned within the craft. But spirits 
gradually revived and before we could make out the 
details of the wharf the Corporal's hearty genuine 
laughter and the Lieutenant's rousing carcajada 
were again drifting across the water. At Balboa I 
unburdened myself of my shooting hardware and, 
catching the labor-train, was soon mounting the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 143 

graveled walk to Ancon police station. In the sec- 
ond-story squad-room of the bungalow were eight 
beds. But there were more than enough policemen 
to go round, and the legal occupant of the bunk I 
fell asleep in returned from duty at midnight and I 
transferred to the still warm nest of a man on the 
" grave-yard " shift. 

" It 's customary to put a man in uniform for a 
while first before assigning him to plain-clothes 
duty," the Inspector was saying next morning when 
I finished the oath of office that had been omitted in 
the haste of my appointment, " but we have waived 
that in your case because of the knowledge of the 
Zone the census must have given you." 

Thus casually was I robbed of the opportunity 
to display my manly form in uniform to tourists 
of trains and the Tivoli — tourists, I say, because 
the " Zoners " would never have noticed it. But we 
must all accept the decrees of fate. 

That was the full extent of the Inspector's re- 
marks ; no mention whatever of the sundry little 
points the recruit is anxious to be enlightened upon. 
In government jobs one learns those details by ex- 
perience. For the time being there was nothing for 
me to do but to descend to the " gum-shoe " desk in 
Ancon station and sit in the swivel-chair opposite 
Lieutenant Long " waiting for orders." 

Toward noon a thought struck me. I swung the 
telephone around and " got " the Inspector. 



144 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" All my junk is up in Empire yet," I remarked. 

" All right, tell the desk-man down there to make 
you out a pass. Or — hold the wire ! As long as 
you 're going out, there 's a prisoner over in Panama 
that belongs up in Empire. Go over and tell the 
Chief you want Tal Fulano." 

I wormed my way through the fawning, neck-cran- 
ing, many-shaded mob of political henchmen and ob- 
sequious petitioners into the sacred hushed precincts 
of Panama police headquarters, A paunched 
" Spigoty " with a shifty eye behind large bowed 
glasses, vainly striving to exude dignity and wisdom, 
received me with the oily smirk of the Panamanian 
office-holder who feels the painful necessity of keep- 
ing on outwardly good terms with all Americans. I 
flashed my badge and mentioned a name. A few 
moments later there was presented to me a sturdy, 
if somewhat flabby, young Spaniard carefully dressed 
and perfumed. We bowed like life-long acquaint- 
ances and, stepping down to the street, entered a 
cab. The prisoner, which he was now only in name, 
was a muscular fellow with whom I should have fared 
badly in personal combat. I was wholly unarmed, 
and in a foreign land. All those sundry little un- 
explained points of a policeman's duty were bubbling 
up within me. When the prisoner turned to remark 
it was a warm day should I warn him that anything 
he said would be used against him? When he or- 
dered the driver to halt before the " Panazone " that 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 145 

he might speak to some friends should I fiercely coun- 
termand the order? What was my duty when the 
friends handed him some money and a package of 
cigars? Suppose he should start to follow his 
friends inside to have a drink — but he did n't. We 
drove languidly on down the avenue and up into An- 
con, where I heaved a genuine sigh of relief as we 
crossed the unmarked street that made my badge 
good again. The prisoner was soon behind pad- 
locks and the money and cigars in the station safe. 
These and him and the transfer card I took again 
with me into the foreign Republic in time for the 
evening train. But he seemed even more anxious 
than I to attract no attention, and once in Empire 
requested that we take the shortest and most incon- 
spicuous route to the police station; and my re- 
sponsibility was soon over. 

Many were the Z. P. facts I picked up during the 
next few days in the swivel-chair. The Zone Police 
force of 1912 consisted of a Chief of Police, an As- 
sistant Chief, two Inspectors, four Lieutenants, eight 
sergeants, twenty corporals, one hundred and seven- 
teen " first-class policemen," and one hundred and 
sixteen " policemen " (West Indian negroes without 
exception, though none but an American citizen could 
aspire to any white position) ; not to mention five 
clerks at headquarters, who are quite worth the men- 
tioning. " Policemen " wore the same uniform as 
" first-class " officers, with khaki-covered helmet in- 



146 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

stead of " Texas " hat and canvas instead of leather 
leggings, drew one-half the pay of a white private, 
were not eligible for advancement, and with some 
few notable exceptions were noted for what they did 
know and the facility with which they could not 
learn. One Inspector was in charge of detective 
work and the other an overseer of the uniformed 
force. Each of the Lieutenants was in charge of 
one-fourth of the Zone with headquarters respec- 
tively at Ancon, Empire, Gorgona, and Cristobal, 
and the sub-stations within these districts in charge 
of sergeants, corporals, or experienced privates, ac- 
cording to importance. 

Years ago when things were yet in primeval chaos 
and the memorable sixth of February of 1904 was 
still well above the western horizon there was gath- 
ered together for the protection of the newly-born 
Canal Strip a band of " bad men " from our fero- 
cious Southwest, warranted to feed on criminals each 
breakfast time, and in command of a man-eating 
rough-rider. But somehow the bad men seemed un- 
able to transplant to this new and richer soil the 
banefulness that had thrived so successfully in the 
land of sage-brush and cactus. The gourmandizing 
promised to be chiefly at the criminal tables ; and be- 
fore long it was noted that the noxious gentlemen 
were gradually drifting back to their native sand 
dunes, and the rough-riding gave way to a more or- 
derly style of horsemanship. Then bit by bit some 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 147 

men — just men without any qualifying adjective 
whatever — began to get mixed up in the matter ; 
one after another army lieutenants were detailed to 
help the thing along, until by and by they got the 
right army lieutenant and the right men and the 
Z. P. grew to what it is to-day, — not the love, per- 
haps, but the pride of every " Zoner " whose name 
cannot be found on some old " blotter." 

There are a number of ways of getting on the 
force. There is the broad and general high-way of 
being appointed in Washington and shipped down 
like a nice fresh vegetable in the original package 
and delivered just as it left the garden without the 
pollution of alien hands. Then there 's the big, 
impressive, broad-shouldered fellow with some life 
and military service behind him, and the papers to 
prove it, who turns up on the Zone and can't help 
getting on if he takes the trouble to climb to head- 
quarters. Or there are the special cases, like Marley 
for instance. 

Marley blew in one summer day from some un- 
charted point of the compass with nothing but his 
hat and a winning smile on his brassy features, and 
naturally soon drifted up the " Thousand Stairs." 
But Marley was n't exactly of that manly build that 
takes "the Chief" and "the Captain" by storm; 
and there were suggestions on his young-old face that 
he had seen perhaps a trifle too much of life. So 
he wiped the sweat from his brow several times at 



148 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

the third-story landing only to find as often that 
the expected vacancy was not yet. Meanwhile the 
tropical days slipped idly by and Marley's " stand- 
in " with the owners of I. C. C. hotel-books began to 
strain and threaten to break away, and everything 
sort of gave up the ghost and died. Everything, 
that is, except the winning smile. 'Til one after- 
noon with only that asset left Marley met the de- 
partment head on the grass-bordered path in front 
of the Episcopal chapel, just where the long descent 
ends and a man begins to regain his tractable mood, 
and said Marley: 

" Say, looka here, Chief. It 's a question of eats 
with me. We can't put this thing off much longer 
or—" 

Which is why that evening's train carried Marley, 
with a police badge and the little flat volume bound 
in imitation leather in his pocket, out to some sub- 
station commander along the line for the corporal in 
charge to break in and hammer down into that fin- 
ished product, a Zone Policeman. 

Incidentally Marley also illustrated some months 
later one of the special ways of getting off the force. 
It was still simpler. Going " on pass " to Colon to 
spend a little evening, Marley neglected to leave his 
No. 38 behind in the squad-room, according to Z. P. 
rules. Which was careless of him. For when his 
spirits reached that stage where he recognized what 
sport it would be to see the " Spigoty " policemen of 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 149 

Bottle Alley dance a western cancan he bethought 
him of the No. 38. Which accounts for the fact 
that the name of Marley can no longer be found on 
the rolls of the Z. P. But all this is sadly antici- 
pating. 

Obviously, you will say, a force recruited from such 
dissimilar sources must be a thing of wide and sundry 
experience. And obviously you are right. Could a 
man catch up the Z. P. by the slack of the khaki 
riding breeches and shake out their stories as a giant 
in need of carfare might shake out their loose 
change, then might he retire to some sunny hillside 
of his own and build him a sound-proof house with 
a swimming pool and a revolving bookcase and a 
stable of riding horses, and cause to be erected on 
the front lawn a kneeling-place where publishers 
might come and bow down and beat their foreheads 
on the pavement. 

There are men in the Z. P. who in former years 
have played horse with the startled markets of great 
American cities ; men whose voices will boom forth 
in the pulpit and whisper sage councils in the pro- 
fessional in years to come ; men whom doting parents 
have sent to Harvard — on whom it failed to take, 
except on their clothes — men who have gone down 
into the Valley of the Shadow of Death and crawled 
on hands and knees through the brakish red brook 
that runs at the bottom and come out again smiling 
on the brink above. Careers more varied than Mexi- 



150 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

can sombreros one might hear in any Z. P. squad- 
room — were not the Z. P. so much more given to 
action than to autobiography. 

They bore little resemblance to what I had ex- 
pected. My mental picture of an American police- 
man was that conglomerate average one uncon- 
sciously imbibes from a distant view of our city forces, 
and by comparison with foreign, — a heavy-footed, 
discourteous, half-fanatical, half-irreligious clubber 
whose wits are as slow as his judgment is honest. In- 
stead of which I found the Z. P. composed almost 
without exception of good-hearted, well set up young 
Americans almost all of military training. I had 
anticipated, from other experiences, a constant bick- 
ering and a general striving to make life unendur- 
able for a new-comer. Instead I was constantly 
surprised at the good fellowship that existed through- 
out the force. There were of course some healthy 
rivalries ; there were no angels among them — or I 
should have fled the Isthmus much earlier; but 
for the most part the Z. P. resembled nothing so 
much as a big happy family. Above all I had ex- 
pected early to make the acquaintance of " graft," 
that shifty-eyed monster which we who have lived in 
large American cities think of as sitting down to din- 
ner with the force in every mess-hall. Graft? Why 
a Zone Policeman could not ride on a P. R. It. train 
in full uniform when off duty without paying his 
fare, though he was expected to make arrests if nee- 




A Zone Police Launch 




Off on Mounted Patrol 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 153 

essary and stop behind with his prisoner. Compared 
indeed with almost any other spot on the broad 
earth's surface " graft " eats slim meals on the Canal 
Zone. 

The average Zone Policeman would arrest his own 
brother — which is after all about the supreme test 
of good policehood. He is not a man who likes to 
keep " blotters," make out accident reports and such 
things, that can be of interest only to those with 
clerks' and bookkeepers' souls. 

He would far rather be battling with sun, man, and 
vegetation in the jungle. He is of those who gen- 
uinely and frankly have no desire to become rich, 
and "successful," a lack of ambition that for- 
mal society cannot understand and fancies a weak- 
ness. 

I had still another police surprise during these 
swivel-chair days. I discovered there was on the 
Zone a yellow tailor who made Beau Brummel uni- 
forms at $7.50, compared with which the $5 ready- 
made ones were mere clothes. All my life long 
I had been laboring under the delusion that a 
uniform is merely a uniform. But one lives and 
learns. 

There are few left, I suppose, who have not heard 
that gray-bea,rded story of the American in the 
Philippines who called his native servant and com- 
manded : 

" Juan, va fetch the caballo from the prado and — 



154 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

and — oh, saddle and bridle him. Damn such a lan- 
guage anyway ! I 'm sorry I ever learned it." 

This is capped on the Zone by another that is not 
only true but strikingly typical. An American boss 
who had been much annoyed by unforeseen absences 
of his workmen pounced upon one of his Spaniards 
one morning crying: 

" When you know por la noche that you 're not 
going to trabaja por la mafiana why in — don't 
you habla ? " 

" Si, seiior," replied the Spaniard. 

By which it may be gathered that linguistic ability 
on the Zone is on a par with that in other U. S. 
possessions. Of the seven of us assigned to plain- 
clothes duty on this strip of seventy-two nationali- 
ties there was a Colombian, a gentleman of Swedish 
birth, a Chinaman from Martinique, and a Greek, 
all of whom spoke English, Spanish, and at least one 
other language. Of the three native Americans two 
spoke only their mother tongue. In the entire white 
uniformed force I met only Lieutenant Long and the 
Corporal in charge of Miraflores who could seriously 
be said to speak Spanish, though I am informed there 
were one or two others. 

This was not for a moment any fault of the Z. P. 
It comes back to our government and beyond that to 
the American people. With all our expanding over 
the surface of the earth in the past fourteen years 
there still hangs over us that old provincial back- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 155 

woods bogie, " English is good enough for me." 
We have only to recall what England does for those 
of her colonial servants who want seriously to study 
the language of some portion of her subjects to have 
something very like the blush of shame creep up the 
back of our necks. Child's task as is the learning of 
a foreign language, provincial old Uncle Sam just 
flat-foots along in the same old way, expecting to 
govern and judge and lead along the path of civili- 
zation his foreign colonies by bellowing at them in 
his own nasal drawl and treating their tongue as if 
it were some purely animal sound. He is well per- 
sonified by Corporal , late of the Z. P. The 

Corporal had served three years in the Philippines 
and five on the Zone, and could not ask for bread 
in the Spanish tongue. " Why don't you learn it? " 
some one asked one day. 

" Awe," drawled the Corporal, " what 's the use 
o' goin' t' all that trouble? If you have t' have any 
interpretin' done all you got t' do is t' call in a 
nigger." 

Uncle Sam not merely lends his servants no assist- 
ance to learn the tongues of his colonies, but should 
one of his subjects appear bearing that extraordi- 
nary accomplishment he gives him no preference what- 
ever, no better position, not a copper cent more 
salary ; and if things get to a pass where a linguist 
must be hired he gives the job to the first citizen 
that comes along who can make a noise that is evi- 



156 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

dentlj not English, or more likely still to some for- 
eigner who talks English like a mouthful of Hun- 
garian goulash. It is not the least of the reasons 
why foreign nations do not take us as seriously as 
they ought, why our colonials do not love us and, 
what is of far greater importance, do not advance 
under our rule as they should. 

Meanwhile there had gradually been reaching me 
" through the proper channels," as everything does 
on the Zone even to our ice-water, the various cou- 
pon-books and the like indispensable to Zone life 
and the proper pursuit of plain-clothes duty. Dis- 
tressing as are statistics the full comprehension 
of what might follow requires the enumeration of 
the odds and ends I was soon carrying about with 
me. 

A brass-check ; police badge ; I. C. C. hotel coupon- 
book ; Commissary coupon-book ; " 120-Trip Ticket " 
(a booklet containing blank passes between any sta- 
tions on the P. R. R., to be filled out by holder) 
Mileage book (purchased by employees at half rates 
of 2| cents a mile for use when traveling on personal 
business) " 24-Trip Ticket " (a free courtesy pass to 
all " gold " employees allowing one monthly round 
trip excursion over any portion of the line) Freight- 
train pass for the P. R. R. ; Dirt-train and locomotive 
pass for the Pacific division; ditto for the Central 
division ; likewise for the Atlantic division ; (in short 
about everything on wheels was free to the "gum- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 159 

shoe" except the "yellow car") Passes admitting 
to docks and steamers at either end of the Zone ; note- 
book; pencil or pen; report cards and envelopes (one 
of which the plain-clothes man must fill out and for- 
ward to headquarters " via train-guard " wherever 
night may overtake him — " the gum-shoe's day's 
work," as the idle uniformed man facetiously dubs 

it). 

Furthermore the man out of uniform is popularly 
supposed never to venture forth among the populace 
without : 

Belt, holster, cartridges, and the No. 38 " Colt " 
that reminds you of a drowning man trying to drag 
you down; handcuffs; police whistle; blackjack (offi- 
cially he never carries this; theoretically there is not 
one on the Isthmus. But the " gum-shoe " natur- 
ally cannot twirl a police club, and it is not always 
policy to shoot every refractory prisoner). Then 
if he chances to be addicted to the weed there is the 
cigarette-case and matches ; a watch is frequently 
convenient; and incidentally a few articles of cloth- 
ing are more or less indispensable even in the dry 
season. Now and again, too, a bit of money does not 
come amiss. For though the Canal Zone is n Utopia 
where man lives by work-coupons alone, the detective 
can never know at what moment his all-embracing 
duties may carry him away into the foreign land of 
Panama ; and even were that possibility not always 
staring him in the face, in the words of " Gorgona 



160 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Red," " You 've got t' have money fer yer booze, 
ain't ye?" 

Which seems also to be Uncle Sam's view of the 
matter. Far and away more important than any of 
the plain-clothes equipment thus far mentioned is the 
" expense account." It is unlike the others in that 
it is not visible and tangible but a mere condition, a 
pleasant sensation like the consciousness of a good 
appetite or a youthful fullness of life. The only 
reality is a form signed by the czar of the Zone him- 
self tucked away among I. C. C. financial archives. 
That authorizes the man assigned to special duty in 
plain clothes to be reimbursed money expended in 
the pursuance of duty up to the sum of $60 per 
month ; though 't is said that the interpretation of 
this privilege to the full limit is not unlikely to 
cause flames of light, thunderous rumblings, and 
other natural phenomena in the vicinity of Empire 
and Culebra. But please note further; these ex- 
penditures may be only " for cab or boat hire, meals 
away from home, and liquor and cigars! " Plainly 
the " gum-shoe " should be a bachelor. 

Fortunately, however, the proprietor of the ex- 
pense account is not required personally to consume 
it each month. It is designed rather to win the 
esteem of bar-tenders, loosen the tongues of sus- 
pects, libate the thirsty stool-pigeon, and prime other 
accepted sources of information. But beware! Ex- 
ceeding care in filling out the account of such expendi- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 161 

tures at the month's end. Carelessness leads a 
hunted life on the Canal Zone. Take, for instance, 
the slight error of my friend — who, having made 
such expenditure in Colon, by a slip of the pen, or 
to be nice, of the typewriter, sent in among three 
score and ten items the following: 

Feb. 4/ 2 bots beer; Cristobal 50c 

and in the course of time found said voucher again 
on his desk with a marginal note of mild-eyed won- 
der and more than idle curiosity, in the handwriting 
of a man very high up indeed; 

Where can you buy beer in Cristobal? 

All this and more I learned in the swivel-chair 
waiting for orders, reading the latest novel that had 
found its way to Ancon station, and receiving fre- 
quent assurances that I should be quite busy enough 
once I got started. Opposite sat Lieutenant Long 
pouring choice bits of sub-station orders into the 
'phone : 

" Don't you believe it. That was no accident. 
He did n't lose everything he had in every pocket 
rolling around drunk in the street. He 's been sys- 
tematically frisked. Sabe frisked? Get on the job 
and look into it." 

For the Lieutenant was one of those scarce and 
enviable beings who can live with his subordinates as 



162 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

man to man, yet never find an ounce of his authority 
missing when authority is needed. 

Now and then a Z. P. story whiled away the time. 

There was the sad case of Corporal in charge 

of station. Early one Sunday afternoon the 

Corporal saw a Spaniard leading a goat along the 
railroad. Naturally the day was hot. The Cor- 
poral sent a policeman to arrest the inhuman wretch 
for cruelty to animals. When he had left the cul- 
prit weeping behind padlocks he went to inspect the 
goat, tied in the shade under the police station. 

" Poor little beast," said the sympathetic Corporal, 
as he set before it a generous pan of ice-water fresh 
from the police station tank. The goat took one 
long, eager, grateful draught, turned over on its 
back, curled up like the sensitive-plants of Panama 
jungles when a finger touches them, and departed this 

vale of tears. But Corporal was an artist of 

the first rank. Not only did he " get away with it " 
under the very frowning battlements of the judge, 
but sent the Spaniard up for ten days on the charge 
against him. Z. P.'s who tell the story assert that 
the Spaniard did not so much mind the sentence as 
the fact that the Corporal got his goat. 

Then there was " the Mystery of the Knocked-out 
Niggers." Day after day there came reports from 
a spot out along the line that some negro laborer 
strolling along in a perfectly reasonable manner 
suddenly lay down, threw a fit, and went into a coma- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 163 

tose state from which he recovered only after a day or 
two in Ancon or Colon hospitals. The doctors gave 
it up in despair. As a last resort the case was 
turned over to a Z. P. sleuth. He chose him a hid- 
ing-place as near as possible to the locality of the 
strange manifestation. For half the morning he 
sweltered and swore without having seen or heard 
the slightest thing of interest to an old " Zoner." 
A dirt-train rumbled by now and then. He strove 
to amuse himself by watching the innocent games of 
two little Spanish switch-boys not far away. They 
were enjoying themselves, as guileless childhood will, 
between their duties of letting a train in and out of 
the switch. Well on in the second half of the morn- 
ing another diminutive Iberian, a water-boy, brought 
his compatriots a pail of water and carried off the 
empty bucket. The boys hung over the edge of 
the pail a sort of wire hook, the handle of their 
home-made drinking-can, no doubt, and went on 
playing. 

By and by a burly black Jamaican in shirt-sleeves 
loomed up in the distance. Now and then as he 
advanced he sang a snatch of West Indian ballad. 
As he espied the " switcheros " a smile broke out on 
his features and he hastened forward his eyes fixed on 
the water-pail. In a working species of Spanish he 
made some request of the boys, the while wiping his 
ebony brow with his sleeve. The boys protested. 
Evidently they had lived on the Zone so long they 



164 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

had developed a color line. The negro pleaded. 
The boys, sitting in the shade of their wigwam, still 
shook their heads. One of them was idly tapping 
the ground with a broom-handle that had lain beside 
him. The negro glanced up and down the track, 
snatched up the boys' drinking vessel, of which the 
wire hooked over the pail was not after all the handle, 
and stooped to dip up a can of water. The little 
fellow with the broom-stick, ceasing a useless pro- 
test, reached a bit forward and tapped dreamily the 
rail in front of him. The Jamaican suddenly sent 
the can of water some rods down the track, danced an 
artistic buck-and-wing shuffle on the thin air above 
his head, sat down on the back of his neck, and after 
trying a moment in vain to kick the railroad out by 
the roots, lay still. 

By this time the sleuth was examining the broom- 
handle. From its split end protruded an inch of 
telegraph wire, which chanced also to be the same 
wire that hung over the edge of the galvanized bucket. 
Close in front of the innocent little fellows ran a 
"third rail!" 

Then suddenly this life of anecdote and leisure 
ended. There was thrust into my hands a type- 
written sheet and I caught the next thing on wheels 
out to Corozal for my first investigation. It was 
one of the most commonplace cases on the Zone. Two 
residents of my first dwelling-place on the Isthmus 
had reported the loss of $150 in U. S. gold. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 165 

Easier burglary than this the world does not offer. 
Every bachelor quarters on the Isthmus, completely 
screened in, is entered by two or three screen-doors, 
none of which is or can be locked. In the building 
are from twelve to twenty-four wide-open rooms of 
two or three occupants each, no three of whom know 
one another's full names or anything else, except that 
they are white Americans and ipso facto (so runs 
Zone philosophy) above dishonesty. The quarters 
are virtually abandoned during the day. Two ne- 
gro janitors dawdle about the building, but they, 
too, leave it for two hours at mid-day. Moreover 
each of the forty-eight or more occupants probably 
has several friends or acquaintances or enemies who 
may drift in looking for him at any hour of the day 
or night. No negro janitor would venture to ques- 
tion a white American's errand in a house; Panama 
is below the Mason and Dixon line. In practice any 
white American is welcome in any bachelor quarters 
and even to a bed, if there is one unoccupied, though 
he be a total stranger to all the community. Add 
to this that the negro tailor's runner often has per- 
mission to come while the owner is away for suits 
in need of pressing, that John Chinaman must come 
and claw the week's washing out from under the bed 
where the " rough-neck " kicked it on Saturday night, 
that there are a dozen other legitimate errands that 
bring persons of varying shades into the building, 
and above all that the bachelors themselves, after 



166 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

the open-hearted old American fashion, have the 
all but universal habit of tossing gold and silver, rail- 
road watches and real-estate bonds, or anything else 
of whatever value, indifferently on the first clear cor- 
ner that presents itself. Precaution is troublesome 
and un-American. It seems a fling at the character 
of your fellow bachelors — and in the vast majority 
of Zone cases it would be. But it is in no sense sur- 
prising that among the many thousands that swarm 
upon the Isthmus there should be some not averse to 
increasing their income by taking advantage of these 
guileless habits and bucolic conditions. There are 
suggestions that a few — not necessarily whites — 
make a profession of it. No wonder " our chief 
trouble is burglary " and has been ever since the Z. 
P. can remember. Summed up, the pay-day gold 
that has thus faded away is perhaps no small amount ; 
compared with what it might have been under pre- 
vailing conditions it is little. 

As for detecting such felonies, police officers the 
world around know that theft of coin of the realm 
in not too great quantities is virtually as safe a pro- 
fession as the ministry. The Z. P. plain-clothes 
man, like his fellows elsewhere, must usually be con- 
tent in such cases with impressing on the victim his 
Sherlockian astuteness, gathering the available facts 
of the case, and return to typewrite his report thereof 
to be carefully filed away among headquarters ar- 
chives. Which is exactly what I had to do in the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 167 

case in question, diving out the door, notebook in 
hand, to catch the evening train to Panama. 

I was growing accustomed to Ancon and even to 
Ancon police-mess when I strolled into headquarters 
on Saturday, the sixteenth, and the Inspector flung 
a casual remark over his shoulder: 

" Better get your stuff together. You 're trans- 
ferred to Gatun." 

I was already stepping into a cab en route for the 
evening train when the Inspector chanced down the 
hill. 

" New Gatun is pretty bad on Saturday nights," 
he remarked. (All too well I remembered it.) 
" The first time a nigger starts anything run him 
in, and take all the witnesses in sight along." 

" That reminds me ; I have n't been issued a gun 
or handcuffs yet," I hinted. 

" Hell's fire, no ? " queried the Inspector. " Tell 
the station commander at Gatun to fix you up." 



CHAPTER VI 

1 SCRIBBLED myself a ticket and was soon roll- 
ing northward, greeting acquaintances at 
every station. The Zone is like Egypt; whoever 
moves must travel by the same route. At Pedro 
Miguel and Cascadas armies of locomotives — the 
" mules " of the man from Arkansas — stood steam- 
ing and panting in the twilight after their day's la- 
bor and the wild race homeward under hungry 
engineers. As far as Bas Obispo this busy, teeming 
Isthmus seemed a native land; beyond, was like en- 
tering into foreign exile. It is a common Zone ex- 
perience that only the locality one lives in during his 
first weeks ever feels like " home." 

The route, too, was a new one. From Gorgona 
the train returned crab-wise through Matachin and 
across the sand dyke that still holds the Chagres 
out of the u cut," and halted at Gamboa cabin. 
Day was dying as we rumbled on across the iron 
bridge above the river and away into the fresh 
jungle night along the rock-ballasted " relocation." 
The stillness of this less inhabited half of the Zone 
settled down inside the car and out, the evening air 
of summer caressing almost roughly through the 

open windows. The train continued its steady way 

168 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 169 

almost uninterruptedly, for though new villages 
were springing up to take the place of the old sink- 
ing into desuetude and the flood along with the 
abandoned line, there were but two where once were 
eight. We paused at the new Frijoles and the box- 
car town of Monte Lirio and, skirting on a higher 
level with a wide detour on the flanks of thick 
jungled and forested hills what is some day to be 
Gatun Lake, drew up at 7 :30 at Gatun. 

I wandered and inquired for some time in a black 
night — for the moon was on the graveyard shift 
that week — before I found Gatun police station 
on the nose of a breezy knoll. But for " Davie," 
the desk-man, who it turned out was also to be my 
room-mate, and a few wistful-eyed negroes in the 
steel-barred room in the center of the building, the 
station was deserted. " Circus," said the desk-man 
briefly. When I mentioned the matter of weapons 
he merely repeated the word with the further infor- 
mation that only the station commander could issue 
them. 

There was nothing to do therefore but to ramble 
out armed with a lead pencil into a virtually un- 
known town riotous with liquor and negroes and the 
combination of Saturday night, circus time, and the 
aftermath of pay-day, and to strut back and forth 
in a way to suggest that I was a perambulating ar- 
senal. But though I wandered a long two hours 
into every hole and corner where trouble might have 



170 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

its breeding-place, nothing but noise took place in 
my sight and hearing. I turned disgustedly away 
toward the tents pitched in a grassy valley between 
the two Gatuns. At least there was a faint hope 
that the equestrienne might assault the ring-master. 

I approached the tent flap with a slightly quick- 
ening pulse. World-wide and centuries old as is 
the experience, personally I was about to " spring 
my badge " for the first time. Suppose the door- 
tender should refuse to honor it and force me to 
impress upon him the importance of the Z. P. — 
without a gun? Outwardly nonchalant I strolled 
in between the two ropes. Proprietor Shipp looked 
up from counting his winnings and opened his 
mouth to shout " ticket ! " I flung back my coat, and 
with a nod and a half-wink of wisdom he fell back 
again to computing his lawful gains. 

By the way, are not you who read curious to 
know, even as I for long years wondered, where a 
detective wears his badge? Know then that long 
and profound investigation among the Z. P. seems 
to prove conclusively that as a general and all but 
invariable rule he wears it pinned to the lining of his 
coat, or under his lapel, or on the band of his 
trousers, or on the breast of his shirt, or in his hip 
pocket, or up his sleeve, or at home on the piano, or 
riding around at the end of a string in the baby's 
nursery; though as in the case of all rules this one 
too has its exceptions. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 171 

Entertainments come rarely to Gatun. The one- 
ringed circus was packed with every grade of so- 
ciety from gaping Spanish laborers to haughty wives 
of dirt-train conductors, among whom it was not 
hard to distinguish in a far corner the uniformed 
sergeant in command of Gatun and the long lean 
corporal tied in a bow-line knot at the alleged wit 
of the versatile but solitary clown who changed his 
tongue every other moment from English to Span- 
ish. But the end was already near; excitement was 
rising to the finale of the performance, a wrestling 
match between a circus man and " Andy " of Pedro 
Miguel locks. By the time I had found a leaning- 
place it was on — and the circus man of course was 
conquered, amid the gleeful howling of " rough- 
necks," who collected considerable sums of money 
and went off shouting into the black night, in quest 
of a place where it might be spent quickly. It 
would be strange indeed if among all the thousands 
of men in the prime of life who are digging the 
canal at least one could not be found who could sub- 
jugate any champion a wandering circus could carry 
among its properties. I took up again the random 
tramping in the dark unknown night; till it was 
two o'clock of a Sunday morning when at last I 
dropped my report-card in the train-guard box and 
climbed upstairs to the cot opposite " Davie," sleep- 
ing the silent, untroubled sleep of a babe. 

I was barely settled in Gatun when the train- 



TO ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

guard handed me one of those frequent typewritten 
orders calling for the arrest of some straggler or de- 
serter from the marine camp of the Tenth Infantry. 
That very morning I had seen " the boss " of cen- 
sus days off on his vacation to the States — from 
which he might not return — and here I was coldly 
and peremptorily called upon to go forth and arrest 
and deliver to Camp Elliott on its hill " Mac," the 
pride of the census, with a promise of $25 reward 
for the trouble. " Mac " desert ? It was to laugh. 
But naturally after six weeks of unceasing repeti- 
tion of that pink set of questions " Mac's " throat 
was a bit dry and he could scarcely be expected to 
return at once to the humdrum life of camp without 
spending a bit of that $5 a day in slaking a tropical 
thirst. Indeed I question whether any but the 
prudish will loudly blame " Mac " even because he 
spent it a bit too freely and brought up in Empire 
dispensary. Word of his presence there soon 
drifted down to the wily plain-clothes man of Em- 
pire district. But it was a hot noonday, the dis- 
pensary lies somewhat up hill, and the uniformless 
officer of the Zone metropolis is rather thickly built. 
Wherefore, stowing away this private bit of infor- 
mation under his hat, he told himself with a yawn, 
" Oh, I'll drag him in later in the day," and drifted 
down to a wide-open door on Railroad Avenue to 
spend a bit of the $25 reward in off-setting the heat. 
Meanwhile " Mac," feeling somewhat recovered from 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 173 

his financial extravagance, came sauntering out of 
the dispensary and, seeing his curly-headed friend 
strolling a beat not far away, naturally cried out, 
" Hello, Eck ! " And what could Eck say, being a 
reputable Zone policeman, but: 

" Why, hello, Mac ! How they f ramin' up ? 
Consider yourself pinched." 

Which was lucky for " Mac." For Eck had once 
worn a marine hat over his own right eye and, 
he knew from melancholy experience that the $25 
was no government generosity, but " Mac's " own 
involuntary contribution to his finding and deliv- 
ery; so managed to slip most of it back into 
" Mac's " hands. 

Long, long after, more than six weeks after in 
fact, I chanced to be in Bas Obispo with a half- 
hour to spare, and climbed to the flowered and many- 
roaded camp on its far-viewing hilltop that falls 
sheer away on the east into the canal. In one of 
the airy barracks I found Renson, cards in hand, 
clear-skinned and " fit " now, thanks to the regular 
life of this adult nursery, though his lost youth was 
gone for good. And " Mac "? Yes, I saw " Mac " 
too — or at least the back of his head and shoulders 
through the screen of the guard-house where Ren- 
son pointed him out to me as he was being locked 
up again after a day of shoveling sand. 

The first days in Gatun called for little else than 
patrol duty, without fixed hours, interspersed with 



174 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

an occasional loaf on the second-story veranda of 
the police-station overlooking the giant locks; close 
at hand was the entrance to the canal, up which 
came slowly barges loaded with crushed stone from 
Porto Bello quarry twenty miles east along the coast 
or sand from Nombre de Dios, twice as distant, 
while further still, spread Limon Bay from which 
swept a never-ending breeze one could wipe dry on 
as on a towel. So long as he has in his pocket no 
typewritten report with the Inspector's scrawl across 
it, " For investigation and report," the plain-clothes 
man is virtually his own commander, with few duties 
beside trying to be in as many parts of his district 
at once as possible and the ubiquitous duty of " keep- 
ing in touch with headquarters." So I wandered 
and mingled with all the life of the vicinity, exactly 
as I should have done had I not been paid a salary 
to do so. By day one could watch the growth of 
the great locks, the gradual drowning of little green, 
new-made islands beneath the muddy still waters of 
Gatun Lake, tramp out along jungle-flanked country 
roads, through the Mindi hills, or down below the 
old railroad to where the cayucas that floated down 
the Chagres laden with fruit came to land on the 
ever advancing edge of the waters. With night 
things grew more compact. From twilight till 
after midnght I prowled in and out through New 
Gatun, spilled far and wide over its several hills, 
watching the antics of negroes, pausing to listen to 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 175 

their guitars and their boisterous merriment, with 
an eye and ear ever open for the unlawful. When 
I drifted into a saloon to see who might be spending 
the evening out, the bar-tender proved he had the 
advantage of me in acquaintance by crying: 
"Hello, Franck! What ye having?" and showing 
great solicitude that I get it. After which I took 
up the starlit tramp again, to run perhaps into 
some such perilous scene as on that third evening. 
A riot of contending voices rose from a building 
back in the center of a block, with now and then 
the sickening thump of a falling body. I approached 
noiselessly, likewise weaponless, peeped in and found 
— four negro bakers stripped to the waist indus- 
triously kneading to-morrow's bread and discussing 
in profoundest earnest the object of the Lord in 
creating mosquitoes. Beyond the native town, as an 
escape from all this, there was the back country 
road that wound for a mile through the fresh night 
and the droning jungle, yet instead of leading off 
into the wilderness of the interior swung around to 
American Gatun on its close-cropped hills. 

I awoke one morning to find my name bulletined 
among those ordered to report for target test. A 
fine piece of luck was this for a man who had scarcely 
fired a shot since, aged ten, he brought down with 
an air-gun an occasional sparrow at three cents a 
head. We took the afternoon train to Mt. Hope 
on the edge of Colon and trooped away to a little 



176 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

plain behind " Monkey Hill," the last resting-place 
of many a " Zoner." The Cristobal Lieutenant, 
father of Z. P., was in charge, and here again was 
that same Z. P. absence of false dignity and the 
genuine good-fellowship that makes the success of 
your neighbor as pleasing as your own. 

" Shall I borrow a gun, Lieutenant? " I asked 
when I found myself " on deck." 

" Well, you '11 have to use your own judgment as 
to that," replied the Lieutenant, busy pasting stick- 
ers over holes in the target. 

The test was really very simple. All you had to 
do was to cling to one end of a No. 38 horse-pistol, 
point it at the bull's-eye of a target, hold it in that 
position until you had put five bullets into said 
bull's-eye, repeat that twice at growing distances, 
mortally wound ten times the image of a Martin- 
ique negro running back and forth across the field, 
and you had a perfect score. Only, simple as it 
was, none did it, not even old soldiers with two or 
three " hitches " in the army. So I had to be con- 
tent with creeping in on the second page of a seven- 
page list of all the tested force from " the Chief " 
to the latest negro recruit. 

The next evening I drifted into the police station 
to find a group of laborers from the adjoining camps 
awaiting me on the veranda bench, because the desk- 
man " did n't sabe their lingo." They proved upon 
examination to be two Italians and a Turk, and their 




Down the beat in New Gatun, the Caribbean in the distance 















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sp* 1 ** 


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The winding back road between the two surviving Gatuns 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 179 

story short, sad, but by no means unusual. Upon 
returning from work one of the Italians had found 
the lock hinges of his ponderously padlocked tin 
trunk hanging limp and screwless, and his pay-day 
roll of some $30 missing from the crown of a hat 
stuffed with a shirt securely packed away in the 
deepest corner thereof. The Turk was similarly un- 
able to account for the absence of his $33 savings 
safely locked the night before inside a pasteboard 
suitcase; unless the fact that, thanks to some sort 
of surgical operation, one entire side of the grip 
now swung open like a barn-door might prove to 
have something to do with the case. The $33 had 
been, for further safety's sake, in Panamanian silver, 
suggesting a burglar with a wheelbarrow. 

The mysterious detective work began at once. 
Without so much as putting on a false beard I re- 
paired to the scene of the nefarious crime. It was 
the usual Zone type of laborers' barracks. A 
screened building of one huge room, it contained 
two double rows of three-tier " standee " canvas 
bunks on gas-pipes. Around the entire room, close 
under the sheet-iron roof, ran a wooden platform 
or shelf reached by a ladder and stacked high with 
the tin trunks, misshapen bundles, and pressed-paper 
suitcases containing the worldly possessions of the 
fifty or more workmen around the rough table be- 
low. 

Theoretically not even an inmate thereof may 



180 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

enter a Zone labor-camp during working hours. 
Practically the West Indian janitors to whom is 
left the enforcement of this rule are nothing if not 
fallible. In the course of the second day I unearthed 
a second Turk who, having chanced the morning 
before to climb to the baggage shelf for his razor 
and soap preparatory to welcoming a fellow coun- 
tryman to the Isthmus, had been mildly startled to 
step on the shoulder-blade of a negro of given 
length and proportions lying prone behind the 
stacked-up impedimenta. The latter explained both 
his presence in a white labor-camp and his uncon- 
ventional posture by asserting that he was the " mos- 
quito man," and shortly thereafter went away from 
there without leaving either card or address. 

By all my library training in detective work the 
next move obviously was to find what color of cig- 
arette ashes the Turk smoked. Instead I blundered 
upon the absurdly simple notion of trying to locate 
the negro of given length and proportions. 
The real " mosquito man " — one of that dark 
band that spends its Zone years with a wire 
hook and a screened bucket gathering evidence 
against the defenseless mosquito for the sani- 
tary department to gloat over — was found not to 
fit the model even in hue. Moreover, " mosquito 
men " are not accustomed to carry their devotion 
to duty to the point of crawling under trunks in 
their quest. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 181 

For a few days following, the hunt led me through 
all Gatun and vicinity. Now I found myself racing 
across the narrow plank bridges above the yawning 
gulf of the locks, with far below tiny men and toy 
trains, now in and out among the cathedral-like 
flying buttresses, under the giant arches past star- 
ing signs of " danger ! " on every hand — as if one 
could not plainly hear its presence without the 
posting. I descended to the very floor of the locks, 
far below the earth, and tramped the long half- 
mile of the three flights between soaring concrete 
walls. Above me rose the great steel gates, stand- 
ing ajar and giving one the impression of an open- 
ing in the Great Wall of China or of a sky-scraper 
about to be swung lightly aside. On them resounded 
the roar of the compressed-air riveters and all the 
way up the sheer faces, growing smaller and smaller 
as they neared the sky, were McClintic-Marshall men 
driving into place red-hot rivets, thrown at them 
viciously by negroes at the forges and glaring like 
comets' tails against the twilight void. 

The chase sent me more than once stumbling away 
across rock-tumbled Gatun dam that squats its vast 
bulk where for long centuries, eighty-five feet below, 
was the village of Old Gatun with its proud church 
and its checkered history, where Morgan and Peru- 
vian viceroys and " Forty-niners " were wont to 
pause from their arduous journeyings. They call 
it a dam. It is rather a range of hills, a part and 



182 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

portion of the highlands that, east and west, en- 
close the valley of the Chagres, its summit resembling 
the terminal yards of some great city. There was 
one day when I sought a negro brakeman attached 
to a given locomotive. I climbed to a yard-master's 
tower above the Spillway and the yard-master, tak- 
ing up his powerful field-glasses, swept the horizon, 
or rather the dam, and discovered the engine for 
me as a mariner discovers an island at sea. 

** Er — would you be kind enough to tell us 
where we can find this Gatun dam we 've heard so 
much about? " asked a party of four tourists, half 
and half as to sex, who had been wandering about on 
it for an hour or so with puzzled expressions of 
countenance. They addressed themselves to a busy 
civil engineer in leather leggings and rolled up 
shirt sleeves. 

" I 'm sorry I have n't time to use the instrument," 
replied the engineer over his shoulder, while he wig- 
wagged his orders to his negro helpers scattered 
over the landscape, " but as nearly as I can tell with 
the naked eye, you are now standing in the exact 
center of it." 

The result of all this sweating and sight-seeing 
was that some days later there was gathered in a 
young Barbadian who had been living for months in 
and about Gatun without any visible source of in- 
come whatever — not even a wife. The Turk and 
the camp janitor identified him as the culprit. But 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 183 

the primer lesson the police recruit learns is that 
it is one thing to believe a man guilty and quite 
another to convince a judge — the most skeptical 
being known to zoology — of that perfectly appar- 
ent fact. With the suspect behind bars, therefore, 
I continued my underground activities, with the re- 
sult that when at length I took the train at New 
Gatun one morning for the court-room in Cristobal 
I loaded into a second-class coach six witnesses ag- 
gregating five nationalities, ready to testify among 
other things to the interesting little point that the 
defendant had a long prison record in Barbados. 

When the echo of the black policeman's " Oye ! 
Oye ! " had died away and the little white-haired 
judge had taken his " bench," I made the discovery 
that I was present not in one, but in four capacities, 
— as arresting officer, complainant, interpreter, and 
to a large extent prosecuting attorney. To swear 
a Turk who spoke only Turkish through another 
Turk, who mangled a little Spanish, for a judge who 
would not recognize a non- American word from the 
voice of a steam-shovel, with a solemn " So Help Me 
God ! " to clinch and strengthen it when the witness 
was a follower of the prophet of Medina — or no- 
body — was not without its possibilities of humor. 
The trial proceeded ; the witnesses witnessed in their 
various tongues, the perspiring arresting officer re- 
duced their statements to the common denominator 
of the judge's single tongue, and the smirking bul- 



184 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

let-headed defendant was hopelessly buried under 
the evidence. Wherefore, when the shining black 
face of his lawyer, retained during the two minutes 
between the " Oye ! " and the opening of the case, 
rose above the scene to purr: 

" Your Honor, the prosecution has shown no case. 
I move the charge against my client be quashed." 

I choked myself just in time to keep from gasping 
aloud, " Well, of all the nerve ! " Never will I learn 
that the lawyer's profession admits lying on the 
same footing with truth in the defense of a culprit. 

" Cause shown," mumbled the Judge without look- 
ing up from his writing, " defendant bound over 
for trial in the circuit court." 

A week later, therefore, there was a similar scene 
a story higher in the same building. Here on Thurs- 
days sits one of the three members of the Zone 
Supreme Court. Jury trial is rare on the Isthmus 
— which makes possibly for surer justice. This 
time there was all the machinery of court and I 
appeared only in my legal capacity. The judge, a 
man still young, with an astonishingly mobile face 
that changed at least once a minute from a furrowy 
scowl with great pouting lips to a smile so broad it 
startled, sat in state in the middle of three judicial 
arm-chairs, and the case proceeded. Within an 
hour the defendant was standing up, the cheery grin 
still on his black countenance, to be sentenced to 
two years and eight months in the Zone penitentiary 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 185 

at Culebra. A deaf man would have fancied he was 
being awarded some prize. One of the never-ending 
surprises on the Zone is the apparent indifference 
of negro prisoners whether they get years or go 
free. Even if they testify in their own behalf it 
is in a listless, detached way, as if the matter 
were of no importance anyway. But the glance 
they throw the innocent arresting officer as they pass 
out on their way to the barb-wire enclosure on the 
outskirts of the Zone capital tells another story. 
There are members of the Z. P. who sleep with a 
gun under their pillow because of that look or a 
muttered word. But even were I nervous I should 
have been little disturbed at the glare in this case, 
for it will probably be a long walk from Culebra 
penitentiary to where I am thirty-two months from 
that morning. 

A holiday air brooded over all Gatun and the 
country-side. Workmen in freshly washed clothing 
lolled in the shade of labor-camps, black Britishers 
were gathering in flat meadows fitted for the national 
game of cricket, far and wide sounded the care-free 
laughter and chattering of negroes, while even 
within Gatun police station leisure and peace seemed 
almost in full possession. 

The morning " touch " with headquarters over, 
therefore, I scrambled away across the silent yawn- 
ing locks and the trainless and workless dam to the 
Spillway, over which already some overflow from the 



186 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

lake was escaping to the Caribbean. My friends 

" Dusty " and H had carried their canoe to 

the Chagres below, and before nine we were off down 
the river. It was a day that all the world north 
of the Tropic of Cancer could not equal; just the 
weather for a perfect " day off." A plain-clothes 
man, it is true, is not supposed to have days off. 
Some one might run away with the Administration 
Building on the edge of the Pacific and the telephone 
wires be buzzing for me — with the sad result that 
a few days later there would be posted in Zone po- 
lice stations where all who turned the leaves might 
read: 

Special Order No 

Having been found Guilty of charges of 

Neglect of Duty 
preferred against him by his commanding officer 
First-class Policeman No. 88 
is hereby fined $2. 

• • f 

Chief of Division. 

But shades of John Aspinwall! Should even a 
detective work on such a Sunday? Surely no crim- 
inal would — least of all a black one. Moreover 
these forest-walled banks were also part of my beat. 

The sun was hot, yet the air of that ozone-rich 
quality for which Panama is famous. For headgear 
we had caps ; and did not wear those, though barely 
a few puffy, snow-white clouds ventured out into 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 189 

the vast char ties s sky all the brilliant day through. 
Then the river; who could describe this lower reach 
of the Chagres as it curves its seven deep and placid 
miles from where Uncle Sam releases it from custody, 
to the ocean. Its jungled banks were without a 
break, for the one or two clusters of thatch and 
reed huts along the way are but a part of the living 
vegetation. Now and then we had glimpses across 
the tree-tops of brilliant green jungle hills further 
inland, everywhere were huge splendid trees, the 
stack-shaped mango, the soldier-erect palm heavy, 
yet unburdened, with cocoanuts. Some fish resem- 
bling the porpoise rose here and there, back and 
forth above the shadows winged snow-white cranes 
so slender one wondered the sea breeze did not wreck 
them. Above all the quiet and peace and content- 
ment of a perfect tropical day enfolded the land- 
scape in a silence only occasionally disturbed by the 
cry of a passing bird. Once a gasoline launch deep- 
laden with Sunday-starched Americans, snorted by, 
bound likewise to Fort Lorenzo at the river's mouth ; 
and we lay back in our soft, rumpled khaki and 
drowsily smiled our sympathy after them. When 
they had drawn on out of earshot life began to 
return to the banks and nature again took posses- 
sion of the scene. Alligators abounded once on this 
lower Chagres, but they have grownscarce now, or 

shy, and though we sat with H 's automatic 

rifle across our knees in turns we saw no more than 



190 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

a carcass or a skeleton on the bank at the foot of 
the sheer wall of impenetrable verdure. 

Till at length the sea opened on our sight through 
the alley- way of jungle, and a broad inviting cocoa- 
nut grove nodded and beckoned on our left. Instead 
we paddled out across the sandbar to play with the 
surf of the Atlantic, but found it safer to return 
and glide across the little bay to the drowsy straw 
and tin village. Here — for the mouth of the 
Chagres like its source lies in a foreign land — a 
solitary Panamanian policeman in the familiar Arc- 
tic uniform enticed us toward the little thatched 
office, and house, and swinging hammock of the 
alcalde to register our names, and our business had 
we had any. So deep-rooted was the serenity of 
the place that even when " Dusty," in all Zone inno- 
cence, addressed the white-haired little mulatto as 
" hombre " he lost neither his dignity nor his tem- 
per. 

The policeman and a brown boy of merry breed 
went with us up the grassy rise to the old fort. 
In its musty vaulted dungeons were still the massive, 
rust-corroded irons for feet, waist and neck of pris- 
oners of the old brutal days ; blind owls stared upon 
us ; once the boy brought down with his honda, or 
slung-shot, one of the bats that circled uncannily 
above our heads. In dank corners were mounds of 
worthless powder; the bakery that once fed the 
miserable dungeon dwellers had crumbled in upon 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 191 

itself. Outside great trees straddled and split the 
massive stone walls that once commanded the en- 
trance to the Chagres, jungle waved in undisputed 
possession in its earth-filled moat, even the old can- 
non and heaped up cannon-balls lay rust-eaten and 
dejected, like decrepit old men who have long since 
given up the struggle. 

We came out on the nose of the fort bluff and 
had before and below us and underfoot all the old 
famous scene, for centuries the beginning of all 
trans-Isthmian travel, — the scalloped surf -washed 
shore with its dwindling palm groves curving away 
into the west, the Chagres pushing off into the 
jungled land. We descended to the beach of the 
outer bay and swam in the salt sea, and the police- 
man, scorning the launch party, squatted a long hour 
in the shade of a tree above in tropical patience. 
Then with " sour " oranges for thirst and nothing 
for hunger — for Lorenzo has no restaurant — we 
turned to paddle our way homeward up the Chagres, 
that bears the salt taste of the sea clear to the 
Spillway. Whence one verse only of a stanza by 
the late bard of the Isthmus struck a false note on 
our ears; 

Then go away if you have to, 
Then go away if you will ! 
To again return you will always yearn 
While the lamp is burning still. 



192 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

You Ve drunk the Chagres water 
And the mango eaten free, 
And, strange though it seems, 
It will haunt your dreams 
This Land of the Cocoanut Tree. 

No catastrophe had befallen during my absence. 
The same peaceful sunny Sunday reigned in Gatun ; 
new-laundered laborers were still lolling in the shade 
of the camps, West Indians were still batting at 
interminable balls with their elongated paddles in 
the faint hope of deciding the national game before 
darkness settled down. Then twilight fell and I 
set off through the rambling town already boisterous 
with church services. Before the little sub-station 
a swarm of negroes was pounding tamborines and 
bawling lustily: 

Oh, y5 mus' be a lover of de Lard 

Or y5 cahn't go t' Heaven when yo di-ie. 

Further on a lady who would have made ebony seem 
light-gray bowed over an organ, while a burly Jamai- 
can blacker than the night outside stood in the 
vestments of the Church of England, telling his ver- 
sion of the case in a voice that echoed back from the 
town across the gully, as if he would drown out all 
rival sects and arguments by volume of sound. The 
meeting-house on the next corner was thronged with 
a singing multitude, tamborines scattered among 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 193 

them and all clapping hands to keep time, even to 
the pastor, who let the momentum carry on and on 
into verse after verse as if he had not the self-sacri- 
fice to stop it, while outside in the warm night 
another crowd was gathered at the edge of the 
shadows gazing as at a vaudeville performance. 
How well-fitted are the various brands of Christian- 
ity to the particular likings of their " flocks." 
The strongest outward manifestation of the reli- 
gion of the West Indian black is this boisterous 
singing. All over town were dusky throngs exer- 
cising their strong untrained voices " in de Lard's 
sarvice " ; though the West Indian is not noted as 
being musical. Here a preacher wanting suddenly 
to emphasize a point or clinch an argument swung 
an arm like a college cheer leader and the entire con- 
gregation roared forth with him some well-known 
hymn that settled the question for all time. 

I strolled on into darker High street. Suddenly 
on a veranda above there broke out a wild unearthly 
screaming. Two negroes were engaged in savage, 
sanguinary combat. Around them in the dim light 
thrown by a cheap tenement lamp I could make out 
their murderous weapons — machetes or great bars 
of iron — slashing wildly, while above the din rose 
screams and curses: 

Y5 Badgyan, ah kill y5 ! 

I sped stealthily yet swiftly up the long steps, draw- 



194 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

ing my No. 38 (for at last I had been issued one) 
as I ran and dashed into the heart of the turmoil 
swallowing my tendency to shout " Unhand him, 
villain ! " and crying instead : 

" Here, what the devil is going on here? " 

Whereupon two negroes let fall at once two pine 
sticks and turned upon me their broad childish grins 
with: 

" We only playin', sar. Playin' single-sticks 
which we larn to de army in Bahbaydos, sahgeant." 

Thus I wandered on, in and out, till the night lost 
its youth and the last train from Colon had dumped 
its merry crowd at the station, then wound away 
along the still and deserted back road through the 
night-chirping jungle between the two surviving 
Gatuns. There was a spot behind the Division En- 
gineer's hill that I rarely succeeded in passing with- 
out pausing to drink in the scene, a scallop in 
the hills where several trees stood out singly and 
alone against the myriad starlit sky, below and be- 
yond the indistinct valleys and ravines from which 
came up out of the night the chorus of the jungle. 
Further on, in American Gatun there was a seat on 
the steps before a bungalow that offered more than 
a good view in both directions. A broad, U. S.- 
tamed ravine sank away in front, across which the 
Atlantic breeze wafted the distance-softened thrum 
of guitar, the tones of fifes and happy negro 
voices, while overhead feathery gray clouds as con- 




The lower reaches of the Chagres 




Gatun Police Station 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 197 

cealing as a dancer's gossamer hurried leisurely by 
across the brilliant face of the moon; to the right 
in a free space the Southern Cross, tilted a bit awry, 
gleamed as it has these untold centuries while ephem- 
eral humans come and pass their brief way. 

It was somewhere near here that Gatun's dry- 
season mosquito had his hiding-place. Rumor whis- 
pers of some such letter as the following received 
by the Colonel — not the blue-eyed czar at Culebra 
this time ; for you must know there is another Colo- 
nel on the Zone every whit as indispensable in his 
sphere : 

Gatun, 26, 1912. 

Dear Colonel: — 

I am writing to call your attention to a gross violation 
of Sanitary Ordinance No. 3621, to an apparent loop- 
hole in your otherwise excellent department. The cir- 
cumstances are as follows; 

On the evening of 24, as I was sitting at the 

roadside between Gatun and New Gatun (some 63 paces 
beyond house No. 226) there appeared a mosquito, which 
buzzed openly and for some time about my ears. It was 
probably merely a male of the species, as it showed no 
tendency to bite; but a mosquito nevertheless. I trust 
you will take fitting measures to punish so bold and inso- 
lent a violation of the rules of your department. 
I am, sir, very truly yours, 

(Mrs.) Henry Peck. 

P. S. The mosquito may be easily recognized by a 
peculiarly triumphant, defiant note in his song. 



198 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

I cannot personally vouch for the above, but if 
it was received any " Zoner " will assure you that 
prompt action was taken. It is well so. The 
French failed to dig the canal because they could 
not down the mosquito. Of course there was the 
champagne and the other things that come with it 
— later in the night. But after all it was the little 
songful mosquito that drove them in disgrace back 
across the Atlantic. 

Still further on toward the hotel and a midnight 
lunch there was one house that was usually worth 
lingering before, though good music is rare on the 
Zone. Then there was the naughty poker game in 
bachelor quarters number — well, never mind that 
detail — to keep an ear on in case the pot grew large 
enough to make a worth-while violation of the law 
that would warrant the summoning of the mounted 
patrolman. 

Meanwhile " cases " stacked up about me. Now 
one took me out the hard U. S. highway that, once 
out of sight of the last negro shanty, rambles errat- 
ically off like the reminiscences of an old man 
through the half-cleared, mostly uninhabited wilder- 
ness, rampant green with rooted life and almost 
noisy with the songs of birds. Eventually within a 
couple of hours it crossed Fox River with its little 
settlement and descended to Mt. Hope police station, 
where there is a 'phone with which to " get in touch " 
again and then a Mission rocker on the screened 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 199 

veranda where the breezes of the near-by Atlantic 
will have you well cooled off before you can catch the 
shuttle-train back to Gatun. 

Or another led out across the lake by the old 
abandoned line that was the main line when first I 
saw Gatun. It drops down beyond the station and 
charges across the lake by a causeway that steam- 
shovels were already devouring, toward forsaken Bo- 
hio. Picking its way across the rotting spiles of 
culverts, it pushed on through the unpeopled jungle, 
all the old railroad gone, rails, ties, the very spikes 
torn up and carried away, while already the parrots 
screamed again in derision as if it were they who 
had driven out the hated civilization and taken pos- 
session again of their own. A few short months 
and the devouring jungle will have swallowed up 
even the place where it has been. 

If it was only the little type-written slip report- 
ing the disappearance of a half-dozen jacks from 
the dam, every case called for full investigation. 
For days to come I might fight my way through the 
encircling wilderness by tunnels of vegetation to 
every native hut for miles around to see if by any 
chance the lost property could have rolled thither. 
More than once such a hunt brought me out on the 
water-tank knoll at the far end of the dam, over- 
looking miles of impenetrable jungle behind and 
above chanting with invisible life, to the right the 
filling lake stretching across to low blue ranges 



200 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

dimly outlined against the horizon and crowned by 
fantastic trees, and all Gatun and its immense works 
and workers below and before me. 

Times were when duty called me into the squalid 
red-lighted district of Colon and kept me there till 
the last train was gone. Then there was nothing 
left but to pick my way through the night out along 
the P. It. R. tracks to shout in at the yard-master's 
window, " How soon y' got anything goin' up the 
line? " and, according to the answer, return to read 
an hour or two in Cristobal Y. M. C. A. or push on 
at once into the forest of box-cars to hunt out the 
lighted caboose. Night freights do not stop at 
Gatun, nor anywhere merely to let off a " gum-shoe." 
But just beyond New Gatun station is a grade that 
sets the negro fireman to sweating even at midnight 
and the big Mogul to straining every nerve and 
sinew, and I did not meet the engineer that could 
drag his long load by so swiftly but that one could 
easily swing off on the road that leads to the police 
station. 

Even on the rare days when " cases " gave out 
there was generally something to while away the 
monotony. As, one morning an American widely 
known in Gatun was arrested on a warrant and, 

chatting merrily with his friend, Policeman , 

strolled over to the station. There his friend Cor- 
poral Macey subdued his broad Irish smile and or- 
dered the deskman to " book him up." The latter 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 201 

was reaching for the keys to a cell when the American 
broke off his pleasant flow of conversation to re- 
mark; 

" All right, Corporal, I 'm going over to the house 
to get a few things and write a few letters. I '11 
be back inside of an hour." 

Whereupon Corporal Macey, being a man of iron 
self-control, refrained from turning a double back 
sommersault and mildly called the prisoner's atten- 
tion to a little point of Zone police rules he had 
overlooked. 

If every other known form of amusement abso- 
lutely failed it was still the dry, or tourist season, 
and poured down from the States hordes of uncon- 
scious comedians, or investigators who rushed two 
whole days about the Isthmus, taking care not to 
get into any dirty places, and rushed home again 
to tell an eager public all about it. Sometimes the 
sight-seers came from the opposite end of the earth, 
a little band of South Americans in tongueless awe 
at the undreamed monster of work about them, yet 
struggling to keep their fancied despite of the " yan- 
qui," to which the " yanqui " is so serenely indiffer- 
ent. Priests from this southland were especially 
numerous. The week never passed that a group of 
them might not be seen peering over the dizzy preci- 
pice of Gatun locks and crossing themselves ostenta- 
tiously as they turned away. 

One does not, at least in a few months, feel the 



202 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" sameness " of climate at Panama and " long again 
to see spring grow out of winter." Yet there is 
something, perhaps, in the popular belief that even 
northern energy evaporates in this tropical land. It 
is not exactly that ; but certainly many a " Zoner " 
wakes up day by day with ambitious plans, and just 
drifts the day through with the fine weather. He 
fancies himself as strong and energetic as in the 
north, yet when the time comes for doing he is apt 
to say, " Oh, I guess I '11 loaf here in the shade 
half an hour longer," and before he knows it another 
whole day is charged up against his meager credit 
column with Father Time. 

There came the day early in April when the In- 
spector must go north on his forty-two days' vaca- 
tion. I bade him bon voyage on board the 8:4<1 
between the two Gatuns and soon afterward was 
throwing together my belongings and leaving " Da- 
vie " to enjoy his room alone. For Corporal Cas- 
tillo was to be head of the subterranean department 
ad interim, and how could the digging of the canal 
continue with no detective in all the wilderness of 
morals between the Pacific and Culebra? Thus it 
was that the afternoon train bore me away to the 
southward. It was a tourist train. A New York 
steamer had docked that morning, and the first-class 
cars were packed with venturesome travelers in their 
stout campaign outfits in which to rough it — in 
the Tivoli and the sight-seeing motors — in their 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 203 

roof-like cork helmets and green veils for the terrible 
Panama heat — which is sometimes as bad as in 
northern New York. 

The P. R. R. is one of the few railroads whose 
passengers may drop off for a stroll, let the train 
go on without them, and still take it to their destina- 
tion. They have only to descend, as I did, at Gam- 
boa cabin and wander down into the " cut," climb 
leisurely out to Bas Obispo, and chat with their 
acquaintances among the Marines lolling about the 
station until the trains puffs in from its shuttle- 
back excursion to Gorgona. The Zone landscape 
had lost much of its charm. For days past jungle 
fires had been sweeping over it, doing the larger 
growths small harm but leaving little of the green- 
ness and rank clinging life of other seasons. Ev- 
erywhere were fires along the way, even in the towns. 
For quartermasters — to 'the rage of Zone house- 
wives were sending up in clouds of smoke the grass 
and bushes that quickly turn to breeding-places of 
mosquitoes and disease with the first rains. Night 
closed down as we emerged from Miraflores tunnel; 
soon we swung around toward the houses, row upon 
row and all alight, climbed the lower slope of An- 
con hill, and at seven I descended in familiar, cab- 
crowded, bawling Panama. 



CHAPTER VII 

IT might be worth the ink to say a word about so- 
cialism on the Canal Zone. To begin with, there 
is n't any of course. No man would dream of look- 
ing for socialism in an undertaking set in motion by 
the Republican party and kept on the move by the 
regular army. But there are a number of little 
points in the management of this private government 
strip of earth that savors more or less faintly of the 
Socialist's program, and the Zone offers perhaps as 
good a chance as we shall ever have to study some 
phases of those theories in practice. 

Few of us now deny the Socialist's main criticisms 
of existing society ; most of us question his remedies. 
Some of us go so far as to feel a sneaking curiosity 
to see railroads and similar purely public utilities 
government-owned, just to find how it would work. 
Down on the Canal Zone they have a sort of modi- 
fied socialism where one can watch much of this un- 
der a Bell jar. There one quickly discovers that a 
locomotive with the brief and sufficient information 
" U. S." on her tender flanks - — or more properly the 
flanks of her tender — gives one a swelling of the 
chest no other combination of letters could inspire. 

Thus far, too, theory seems to work well. The service 

204 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 205 

could hardly be better, and recalling that under the 
old private system the fare for the forty-seven miles 
across the Isthmus was $25 with a charge of ten 
cents for every pound of baggage, the $2.40 of to- 
day does not seem particularly exorbitant. 

The official machinery of this private government 
strip also seems to run like clockwork. To be sure 
the wheels even of a clock grind a bit with friction 
at times, but the clock goes on keeping time for all 
that. The Canal Zone is the best governed district 
in the United States. It is worth any American's 
time and sea-sickness to run down there, if only to 
assure himself that Americans really can govern ; un- 
til he does he will not have a very clear notion of just 
what good American government means. 

But before we go any further be it noted that the 
socialism of the Canal Zone is under a benevolent des- 
pot, an Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent ruler; 
which is perhaps the one way socialism would work, at 
least in the present stage of human progress. The 
three Omnis are combined in an inconspicuous, white- 
haired American popularly known on the Zone as 
" the Colonel " — so popularly in fact that an at- 
tempt to replace him would probably " start some- 
thing " among all classes and races of " Zoners." 
That he is omnipotent — on the Zone — not many 
will deny ; a few have questioned — and landed in the 
States a week later much less joyous but far wiser. 
Omniscient — well they have even Chinese secret-serv- 



206 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

ice men on the Isthmus, and soldiers and marines not 
infrequently go out in civilian clothes under sealed 
orders ; to say nothing of " the Colonel's private 
gum-shoe " and probably a lot of other underground 
sources of information neither you nor I shall ever 
hear of. But you must get used to spies under 
socialism, you know, until we all wear one of Saint 
Peter's halos. Look at the elaborate system of the 
Incas, even with their docile and uninitiative sub- 
jects. In the matter of Omnipresence; it would be 
pretty hard to find a hole on the Canal Zone where 
you could pull off a stunt of any length or impor- 
tance without the I. C. C. having a weather-eye on 
you. When it comes to the no less indispensable in- 
gredient of benevolence one glimpse of those mild 
blue eyes would probably reassure you in that point, 
even without the pleasure of watching the despot 
sit in judgment on his subjects in his castle office on 
Sunday mornings like old Saint Louis under his oak 
— though with a tin of cigarettes beside him that 
old Louis had to worry along without. 

This all-powerful government insists on and en- 
forces many of the things which Americans as a 
whole stand for, — Sunday closing, suppression of 
resorts, forbidding of gambling. But the Zone is no 
test whether these laws could be genuinely enforced in 
a whole nation. For down there Panama and Colon 
serve as a sort of safety-valve, where a man can run 
down in an hour or so on mileage or monthly pass 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 207 

and blow off steam; get rid of the bad internal va- 
pors that might cause explosion in a ventless 
society. This we should not lose sight of when we 
boast that there are few crimes and no real resorts 
on the Zone. " The Colonel " himself will tell you 
there is no gambling. Yet it is curious how many 
of the weekly prizes of the Panama lottery find their 
way into the pockets of American canal builders, and 
in any Zone gathering of whatever hour — or sex ! 
— you are almost certain to hear flitting back and 
forth mysterious whispers of w — have a 6 and a 4 
this week." 

The Zone system is work-coupons for all; much 
as the Socialist would have it. Only the legitimate 
members of the community — the workers — can live 
in it — long. You should see the nonchalant way a 
clerk at the government's Tivoli hotel charges a 
tourist a quarter for a cigar the government sells 
for six cents in its commissaries. Mere money does 
not rank high in Zone society. It 's the labor-cou- 
pon that counts. They sell cigarettes at the Y. M. 
G. A. ; you are in that state where you would give 
your ticket home for a smoke. Yet when you throw 
down good gold or silver, black Sam behind the 
showcase looks up at you with that pitying cold eye 
kept in stock for new-comers, and says wearily ; 

" Cahn't take no money heah, boss." 

That surely is a sort of socialism where a slip of 
paper showing merely that you have done your ap- 



208 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

pointed task gets you the same meal wherever you 
may drop in, a total stranger, yet without being 
identified, without a word from any one, but merely 
thrusting your coupon-book at the yellow West In- 
dian at the door as you enter that he may snatch 
out so many minutes of labor. Drop in anywhere 
there is a vacant bed and you are perfectly at home. 
There is the shower-bath, the ice-water, the veranda 
rocker — you knew exactly what was coming to you, 
just what kind of bed, just what vegetables you 
would be served at dinner. It reminds one of the 
Inca system of providing a home for every citizen, 
and tambos along the way if he must travel. 

But it is the same meal. That is just the point. 
There is where you begin to furrow your brow and 
look more closely at this splendid system, and fall to 
wondering if that public kitchen of socialism would 
not become in time an awful bore, There are some 
things in which we want variety and originality and 
above all personality. A meal is a meal, I suppose, 
as a cat is a cat; yet there are many subtle little 
things that make the same things distinctly different. 
When it comes to dinner you want a rosy fat Ger- 
man or a bulky French madame putting thought and 
pride and attention into it; which they will do only 
if they get good coin of the realm or similar ma- 
terial emolument out of it in proportion. No one 
will ever fancy he has a " mission " to serve good 
meals — to the public. 




'Far below were tiny men and toy trains' 




■ ■■ " - . ■ . ■ 



tmi-m-K^ :' ?« ; . ■:":?;:.■ ■ .#« «*«» 



"The week never passed that a group of priests from South America 
might not be seen peering over the dizzy precipice of Gatun locks" 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 211 

In the I. C. C. hotels we have a government steward 
who draws a good salary and wears a nice white col- 
lar. But though he is sometimes a bit different, and 
succeeds in making his hotel so, it is only in degree. 
He is not a great frequenter of the dining-room ; at 
times one wonders just what his activities are. Cer- 
tainly it is not the planning of meals, for the I. C. C. 
menu is as fixed and automatic as if it had been taken 
from a stone slab in the pyramids. A poor meal 
neither turns his hair white nor cuts down his in- 
come. Frequently, especially if he is English and 
certainly if he has been a ship's steward, the negro 
waiters seem to run his establishment without inter- 
ference. Dinner hours, for example, are from 11 
to 1. But beware the glare of the waiter at whose 
table you sit down at 12 :50. He slams cold rubbish 
at you from the discard and snatches it away again 
before you have time to find you can't eat it. You 
have your choice of enduring this maltreatment or 
of unostentatiously slipping him a coin and a hint 
to go cook you the best he can himself. For you 
know that as the closing hour approaches the cooks 
will not have their private plans interfered with by 
accepting your order. Here again is where the fat 
German or the French madame is needed — with an 
ox-goad. 

In other words the tip system invented by 
Pharaoh and vitiated by quick-rich Americans rages 
as fiercely in government hotels on the Zone as in any 



212 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" lobster palace " bordering Broadway — worse, for 
here the non-tipper has no living being to advocate 
his cause. All food is government property. Yet 
I have sat down opposite a man who gave the govern- 
ment at the door a work-coupon identical with mine, 
but who furthermore dropped into the waiter's hand 
" 85 cents spig " — which is half as bad as to do it 
in U. S. currency — and while I was gazing tear- 
fully at a misshapen lump of vacunal gristle there 
was set before him, steaming hot from the govern- 
ment kitchen, a porterhouse steak which a dollar 
bill would not have brought him within scenting dis- 
tance of in New York. Do not blame the waiter. 
If he does not slip an occasional coin to the cook he 
will invariably draw the gristle, and even occa- 
sional coins do not grow on his waist band. It would 
be as absurd to charge it to the cook* He probably 
has a large family to support, as he would have un- 
der socialism. There runs this story on the Zone, 
vouched for by several: 

A " Zoner " called an I. C. C. steward and com- 
plained that his waiter did not serve him reason- 
ably: 

" Well," sneered the steward, " I guess you did n't 
come across ? " 

" Come across ! Why, damn you, I suppose you 're 
getting your rake-off too? " 

" I certainly am," replied the steward ; " What do 
you think I 'm down here for, me health ? " 







K* 



A Panamanian Policeman and a Z. P. "gum-shoe' 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 215 

Surely we can't blame it all to the steward, or to 
any other individual. Lay it rather to human na- 
ture, that stumbling-block of so many varnished and 
upholstered systems. 

I hope I am not giving the impression that I. C. C. 
hotels are unendurable. " Stay home " — which on 
the Zone means always eat at the same hotel table 
— subsidize your waiter and you do moderately well. 
But to move thither and yon, as any plain-clothes 
man must, is unfortunate. The only difference then 
is that the next is worse than the last. Whatever 
their convictions upon arrival, almost all Americans 
have come down to paying their waiter the regular 
blackmail of a dollar a month and setting it down 
as one of the unavoidable evils of life. One or two 
I knew who insisted on sticking to " principles," and 
they grew leaner and lanker day by day. 

Because of these things many an American em- 
ployee will be found eating in private restaurants 
of the ubiquitous Chinaman or the occasional Span- 
iard, though here he must often pay in cash instead 
of in futures on his labor — which are so much 
cheaper the world over. It is sad enough to dine 
on the same old identical round for months. But 
how if you were one of those who blew in on the 
heels of the last Frenchman and have been eating 
it ever since? By this time even rat-tails would be 
a welcome change — and with genuine socialism there 
would not even be that escape. It is said to be this 



£16 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 . 

hotel problem as much as the perpetual spring-time 
of the Zone that so frequently reduces — with the 
open connivance of the government — a building 
housing forty-eight quiet, harmless bachelors to a 
four-family residence housing eight and gradually 
upwards ; that wreaks such matrimonious havoc 
among the white-frocked stenographers who come 
down to type and remain to cook. 

Besides the hotel there is the P. R. R. commissary, 
the government department stores. It is likewise 
laundry, bakery, ice-factory; it makes ice-cream, 
roasts coffee, sends out refrigerator-cars and a 
morning supply train to bring your orders right 
to your door — oh, yes, it strongly resembles what 
Bellamy dreamed years ago. Only, as in the case 
of the hotel, there seems to be a fly or two in 
the amber. 

The laundry is tolerable — fancy turning your 
soiled linen over to a railroad company — all ma- 
chine done of course, as everything would be under 
socialism, and no come-back for the garment that is 
not hardy enough of constitution to stand the sys- 
tem. In the stores is little or no shoddy material; 
in general the stock is the best available. If a bis- 
cuit or a bolt of khaki is better made in England 
than in the United States the commissary stocks 
with English goods, which is unexpected broad- 
mindedness for government management. But while 
prices are lower than in Panama or Colon they are 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 217 

every whit as high as in American stores ; and 
most of us know something of the exorbitant profit 
our private merchants exact, particularly on manu- 
factured goods. The government claims to run the 
commissary only to cover cost. Either that is a 
crude government joke or there is a colored gentle- 
man esconced in the coal-bin. Moreover if the com- 
missary has n't the stuff you want you had better 
give up wanting, for it has no object in laying in a 
supply of it just to oblige customers. Its clerks 
work in the most languid, unexcited manner. They 
have no object whatever in holding your trade, and 
you can wait until they are quite ready to serve you, 
or go home without. True, most of them are merely 
negroes, and the few Americans at the head of de- 
partments are chiefly provincial little fellows from 
small towns whose notions of business are rather 
those of Podunk, Mass., than of New York. But 
lolling about the commissary a half-hour hoping to 
buy a box of matches, one cannot shake off the con- 
viction that it is the system more than the clerks. 
Poets and novelists and politicians may work for 
" glory," but no man is going to show calico and fit 
slippers for such remuneration. 

Nor are all the old evils of the competitive method 
banished from the Zone. In the Canal Record, the 
government organ, the government commissary ad- 
vertised a sale of excellent $7 rain-coats at $1 each. 
The " Record " J It is like reading it in the Bible. 



218 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Witness the rush of bargain hunters, who, it proves, 
are by no means of one gender. Yet those splendid 
rain-coats, as manager, clerks, and even negro sweep- 
ers well knew and could not refrain from snickering 
to themselves at thought of, were just as rain-proof 
as a poor grade of cheese-cloth. I do not speak 
from hear-say for I was numbered among the bar- 
gain hunters — " recruits " are the natural victims, 
and there arrive enough of them each year to get 
rid of worthless stock. Ten minutes after making 
the purchase I set out to walk to Corozal through 
the first mild shower of the rainy season — and ar- 
rived there I went and laid the bargain gently in 
the waste-basket of Corozal police station. 

Thus does the government sink to the petty ras- 
calities of shop-keepers. Even a government man- 
ager on a fixed salary — in work-coupons — will 
descend to these tricks of the trade to keep out of 
the clutches of the auditor, or to make a " good 
record." The socialist's answer perhaps would be 
that under their system government factories would 
make only perfect goods. But won't the factory 
superintendent also be anxious to make a " record "? 
And even government stock will deteriorate on the 
shelves. 

All small things, to be sure; but it is the sum of 
small things that make up that great complex thing 
— Life. Few of us would object to living in that 
ideal dream world. But could it ever be ? I have 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 219 

anxiously asked this question and hinted at these 
little weaknesses suggested by Zone experiences to 
several Zone socialists — who are not hard to find. 
They merely answer that these things have nothing 
to do with the case. But not one of them ever went 
so far as to demonstrate; and though I was born a 
long way north of Missouri I once passed through a 
corner of the state. 

As to the other side of the ledger, — equal pay 
for all, nowhere is man further from socialism than 
on the Canal Zone. Caste lines are as sharply 
drawn as in India, which should not be unexpected 
in an enterprise largely in charge of graduates of 
our chief training-school for caste. The Brahmins 
are the " gold " employees, white American citizens 
with all the advantages and privileges thereto ap- 
pertaining. But — and herein we out-Hindu the 
Hindus — the Brahmin caste itself is divided and 
subdivided into infinitesimal gradations. Every rank 
and shade of man has a different salary, and exactly 
in accordance with that salary is he housed, fur- 
nished, and treated down to the least item, — number 
of electric lights, candle-power, style of bed, size 
of bookcase. His Brahmin highness, " the Colonel," 
has a palace, relatively, and all that goes with it. 
The high priests, the members of the Isthmian Canal 
Commission, have less regal palaces. Heads of the 
big departments have merely palatial residences. 
Bosses live in well-furnished dwellings, conductors 



220 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

are assigned a furnished house — or quarter of a 
house. Policemen, artisans, and the common garden 
variety of bachelors have a good place to sleep. It 
is doubtful, to be sure, whether one-fourth of the 
" Zoners " of any class ever lived as well before or 
since. The shovelman's wife who gives five-o'clock 
teas and keeps two servants will find life different 
when the canal is opened and she moves back to the 
smoky little factory cottage and learns again to do 
her own washing. 

At work, " on the job " there is a genuine Ameri- 
can freedom of wear-what-you-please and a general 
habit of going where you choose in working clothes. 
That is one of the incomprehensible Zone things to 
the little veneered Panamanian. He cannot rid him- 
self of his racial conviction that a man in an old 
khaki jacket who is building a canal must be of in- 
ferior clay to a hotel loafer in a frock coat and a 
tall hat. The real " Spig " could never do any real 
work for fear of soiling his clothes. He cannot get 
used to the plain, brusk American type without em- 
broidery, who just does things in his blunt, efficient 
way without wasting time on little exterior courte- 
sies. None of these childish countries is man 
enough to see through the rough surface. Even 
with seven years of American example about him the 
Panamanian has not yet grasped the divinity of 
labor. Perhaps he will eons hence when he has 
grown nearer true civilization. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 221 

But among Americans off the job reminiscences 
of East India flock in again. D, who is a 
quartermaster at $225, may be on " How-are-you- 
old-man? " terms with G, who is a station agent and 
draws $175. But Mrs. D never thinks of calling on 
Mrs. G socially. H and J, who are engineer and 
cranemen respectively on the same steam-shovel, are 
probably " Hank " and " Jim " to each other, but 
Mrs. H would be horrified to find herself at the same 
dance with Mrs. J. Mrs. X, whose husband is a fore- 
man at $165, and whose dining table is a full six 
inches longer and whose ice-box will hold one more 
cold-storage chicken, would not think of sitting in 
at bridge with Mrs. Y, whose husband gets $150. As 
for being black, or any tint but pure " white " ! 
Even an Englishman, though he may eat in the same 
hotel if his skin is not too tanned, is accepted on 
staring suffrance. As for the man whose skin is a 
bit dull, he might sit on the steps of an I. C. C. hotel 
with dollars dribbling out of his pockets until he 
starved to death — and he would be duly buried in 
the particular grave to which his color entitled him. 
A real American place is the Zone, with outward 
democracy and inward caste, an unenthusiastic and 
afraid-to-break-the-conventions place in play, and 
the opposite at work. 

Yet with it all it is a good place in which to live. 
There you have always summer, jungled hills to look 
on by day and moonlight, and to roam in on Sunday 



222 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

— unless you are a policeman seven days a week. It 
is possible that perpetual summer would soon breed 
quite a different type of American. The Isthmus 
is nearly always in boyish — or girlish — good 
temper. Zone women and girls are noted for plump 
figures and care-free faces. And there is a content- 
ment that is more than climatic. There are no hard 
times on the Zone, no hurried, worried faces, no 
famished, wolfish eyes. The " Zoner " has his little 
troubles of course, — the servant problem, for in- 
stance, for the Jamaican housemaid is a thorn in any 
side. Now and then we hear some one wailing, " Oh, 
it gets so — tiresome ! Everybody 's shoveling dirt 
or talking about the other fellow." But he knows 
it is n't strictly true when he says it and that he is 
kicking chiefly to keep in practice. Every one is 
free from worries as to job, pay, house, provisions, 
and even hospital fees, and the smoothness of it all, 
perhaps, gets on his nerves at times. I question 
whether " the Colonel " himself loses much sleep 
when a chunk of the hill that bears up his residence 
lets go and pitches into the canal. It sets one to 
musing at times whether the rock-bound system of 
the Incas was not best after all, — a place for every 
man and every man in his place, each his allotted 
work, which he was fully able to do and getting Hail 
Columbia if he failed to do it. 

Which brings up the question of results in la- 
bor under the pseudo-socialist Zone system. Most 



• ; --.. 





ZONE POLICEMAN 88 225 

American employees work steadily and take their 
work seriously. It is as if each were individually 
proud of being one of the chosen people and build- 
ers of the greatest work of modern times. Yet the 
far-famed " American rush " is not especially preva- 
lent. The Zone point of view seems to be that no 
shoveling is so important, even that of digging a 
ditch half the ships of the world are waiting to 
cross, that a man should bring upon himself a pre- 
mature funeral. The common laborers, non-Ameri- 
cans, almost dawdle. There are no contractor's 
Irish straw-bosses to keep them on the move. The 
answer to the Socialist's scheme of having the gov- 
ernment run all big building enterprises is to go 
out and watch any city street gang for an hour. 

The bringing together into close contact of 
Americans from every section of our broad land is 
tending to make a new amalgamated type. Even 
New Englanders grow almost human here among 
their broader-minded fellow-countrymen. Any 
northerner can say " nigger " as glibly as a Caro- 
linian, and growl if one of them steps on his shadow. 
It is not easy to say just how much effect all this 
will have when the canal is done and this handful of 
amalgamated and humanized Americans is sprinkled 
back over all the States as a leaven to the whole. 
They tell on the Zone of a man from Maine who sat 
four high-school years on the same bench with two 
negro boys, and returning home after three years 



226 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

on the Isthmus was so horrified to find one of those 
boys an alderman that he packed his traps and 
moved to Alabama, " where a nigger is a nigger " — 
and if there is n't the " makings " of a story in 
that I '11 leave it to the postmaster of Miraflores. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THERE is much in this police business," said 
" the Captain," with his slow, deliberate 
enunciation, " that must lead to a blank wall. Out 
of ten cases to investigate it is quite possible nine 
will result in nothing. This percentage could not 
of course be true of a thousand cases and a man's 
services still be considered satisfactory. But of 
ten it is quite possible. As for knowing how to 
do detective work, all I bring to the department my- 
self is some ordinary common sense and a little 
knowledge of human nature, and with these I try 
to work things out as best I can. This peeping- 
through-the-key-hole police work I know nothing 
whatever about, and don't want to. Nor do I ex- 
pect a man to." 

I had been discussing with " the Captain " my 
dissatisfaction at my failure to " get results " in 
an important case. A few weeks on the force had 
changed many a preconceived notion of police life. 
It had gradually become evident, for instance, that 
the profession of detective is adventurous, absorb- 
ing, heart-stopping chiefly between the covers of 
popular fiction ; that real detective work, like al- 
most any other vocation, is made up largely of the 

227 



228 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

little unimportant every-day details, with only a 
rare assignment bulking above the mass. As " the 
Captain " said, it was just plain every-day work car- 
ried on by the application of ordinary common 
sense. Such best-seller artifices as disguise were 
absurd. Not only would disguise in all but the 
rarest cases be impossible, but useless. The A-B-C 
of plain-clothes work is to learn to know a man 
by his face rather than by his clothing — and at the 
outset one will be astonished to find how much he 
has hitherto been depending on the latter. It must 
be the same with criminals, too, unless your crimi- 
nal is an amateur or a fool, in which event you will 
" land " him without the trouble of disguising. A 
detective furthermore should not be a handsome man 
or a man of striking appearance in any way; the 
ideal plain-clothes man is the little insignificant 
snipe whom even the ladies will not notice. 

Since April tenth I had been settled in notorious 
House 111, Ancon, a sort of frontiersman resort or 
smugglers' retreat — had there been anything to 
smuggle — where to have fallen through the veranda 
screening would have been to fall into a foreign land. 
As pay-day approached there came the duty of stand- 
ing a half-hour at the station gate before the de- 
parture of each train to watch. and discuss with the 
ponderous, smiling, dark-skinned chief of Panama's 
plain-clothes squad, or with a vigilante the suspi- 
cious characters and known crooks of all colors 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 229 

going out along the line. On the twelfth, thir- 
teenth and fourteenth the I. C. C. pay-car, that bank 
on wheels guarded by a squad of Z. P., sprinkled its 
half-million a day along the Zone. Then plain- 
clothes duty was not merely to scan the embarking 
passengers but to ride out with each train to one 
of the busy towns. There scores upon scores of 
soil-smeared workmen swarmed over all the land- 
scape with long paper-wrapped rolls of Panamanian 
silver in their hands, while flashily dressed touts and 
crooks of both sexes drifted out from Panama with 
every train to worm their insidious way into wher- 
ever the scent of coin promised another month free 
from labor. To add to those crowded times the 
chief dissipation of the West Indian during the few 
days following pay-day that his earnings last is to 
ride aimlessly and joyously back and forth on the 
trains. 

There is one advantage, though some policemen 
call it by quite the opposite name, in being stationed 
at Ancon. When crime takes a holiday and do- 
nothing threatens tropical dementia, or a man tires 
of his native land and people a short stroll down 
the asphalt takes him into the city of Panama. 
Barely across the street where his badge becomes 
mere metal, and he must take care not to arrest 
absent-mindedly the first violator of Zone laws — 
whom he is sure to come upon within the first block 
— he notes that the English tongue has suddenly 



230 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

almost disappeared. On every hand, lightly 
sprinkled with many other dialects, sounds Spanish, 
the slovenly Spanish of Panama in which bueno is 
" hiieno " and calle is " caye." As he swings lan- 
guidly to the right into Avenida Central he grows 
gradually aware that there has settled down about 
14m a cold indifference, an atmosphere quite differ- 
ent from that on his own side of the line. Those 
he addresses in the tongue of the land reply to his 
questions with their customary gestures and fixed 
phrases of courtesy. But no more ; and a cold 
dead silence falls sharply upon the last word, and at 
times, if the experience be comparatively new, there 
seems to hover in the air something that reminds him 
that way back fifty-six years ago there was a 
" massacre " of Americans in Panama city. For 
the Panamanian has little love for the United States 
or its people; which is the customary thanks any 
man or nation gets for lifting a dirty half-breed 
gamin from the gutter. 

Off in the vortex of the city lolls Panama's 
public market, where Chinamen are the chief 
sellers and flies the chief consumers. Myriads 
of fruits in every stage of development and disinte- 
gration, haggled bits of meat, the hundred sights 
and sounds and smells one hurries past suggest 
that Panama may even have outdone Central 
America before Uncle Sam came with his garbage- 
cans and his switch. Further on, down at the old 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 231 

harbor, lingers a hint of the picturesqueness of 
Panama in pre-canal days. Clumsy boats, empty, 
or deep-laden with fruit from, or freight to, the sev- 
eral islands that sprinkle the bay, splash and bump 
against the little cement wharf. Aged wooden 
"windjammers " doze at their moorings, everywhere 
are jabbering natives with that shifty half-cast eye 
and frequent evidence of deep-rooted disease. Al- 
most every known race mingles in Panama city, even 
to Chinese coolies in their umbrella hats and rolled 
up cotton trousers, delving in rich market gardens 
on the edges of the town or dog-trotting through 
the streets under ,two baskets dancing on the ends 
of a bamboo pole, till one fancies oneself at times 
in Singapore or Shanghai. The black Zone 
laborer, too, often prefers to live in Panama for the 
greater freedom it affords — there he does n't have 
to clean his sink so often, marry his " wife," or ban- 
ish his chickens from the bedroom. Policemen with 
their clubs swarm everywhere, for no particular rea- 
son than that the little republic is forbidden to play 
at army, and with the presidential election ap- 
proaching political henchmen must be kept good- 
humored. Not a few of these officers are West 
Indians who speak not a word of Spanish — nor 
any other tongue, strictly speaking. 

Rubber-tired carriages roll constantly by along 
Uncle Sam's macadam, amid the jingling of their 
musical bells. Every one takes a carriage in Pan- 



£32 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

ama. Any man can afford ten cents even if he^ has 
no expense account; besides he runs no risk of be- 
ing overcharged, which is a greater advantage than 
the cost. All this may be different when Panama's 
electric line, all the way from Balboa docks to Las 
Sabanas, is opened — but that 's another year. 
Meanwhile the lolling in carriages comes to be quite 
second nature. 

But like any tropical Spanish town Panama seethes 
only by night, especially Saturday and Sunday 
nights when the paternal Zone government allows 
its children to spend the evening in town. Then 
frequent trains, unknown during the week, begin with 
the setting of the sun to disgorge Americans of all 
grades and sizes through the clicking turnstiles into 
the arms of gesticulating hackmen, some to squirm 
away afoot between the carriages, all to be swal- 
lowed up within ten minutes in the great sea of 
" colored " people. So that, large as may be each 
train-load, white American faces are so rare on 
Panama streets that one involuntarily glances at 
each that passes in the throng. 

It is the " gum-shoe's " duty to know and be un- 
known in as many places as possible. Wherefore on 
such nights, whatever his choice, he drifts early 
down by the " Normandie " and on into the " Pana- 
zone " to see who is out, and why. In the latter 
emporium he adds a bottle of beer to his expense ac- 
count, endures for a few moments the bawling above 



.\ 



V: 



pa 
& 

PS 



: 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 235 

the scream of the piano of two Americans of Pales- 
tinian antecedents, admires some local hero, like 
" Baldy " for instance, who is credited with doing 
what Napoleon could not do, and floats on, perhaps 
to screw up his courage and venture into the thinly- 
clad Teatro Apolo. He who knows where to look, 
or was born under a lucky star, may even see on 
these merry evenings a big Marine from Bas Obispo 
or a burly soldier of the Tenth howling some joyful 
song with six or seven little " Spig " policemen 
climbing about on his frame. At such times every- 
thing but real blood, flows in Panama. Her history 
runs that way. On the day she won her independ- 
ence from Spain it is said the General in Chief cut 
his finger on a wine glass. The day she won it 
from Colombia there was a Chinaman killed — but 
every one agrees that was due to the celestial's crim- 
inal carelessness. 

Down at the quieter end of the city are "Las 
Bovedas," that curving sea-wall Phillip of Spain 
tried to make out from his palace walls, as many an- 
other, regal and otherwise, has strained his eyes in 
vain to see where his good coin has gone. But the 
walls are there all right, though Phillip never saw 
them; crumbling a bit, yet still a sturdy barrier to 
the sea. A broad cement and grass promenade runs 
atop, wide as an American street. Thirty or forty 
feet below the low parapet sounds the deep, time- 
mellowed voice of the Pacific, as there rolls higher 



236 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

and higher up the rock ledges that great tide so 
different from the scarcely noticeable one at Colon. 
The summer breeze never dies down, never grows 
boisterous. On the landward side Panama lies 
mumbling to itself, down in the hollow between 
squats Chiriqui prison with its American warden, 
once a Zone policeman; while in the round stone 
watch-towers on the curving parapets lean prison 
guards with fixed bayonets and incessantly blow the 
shrill tin whistles that is the universal Latin-Ameri- 
can artifice for keeping policemen awake. On the 
way back to the city the elite — or befriended — 
may drop in at the University Club at the end of 
the wall for a cooling libation. 

On Sunday night comes the band concert in the 
palm-ringed Cathedral Plaza. There is one on 
Thursday, too, in Plaza Santa Ana, but that is 
packed with all colors and considered " rather 
vulgah." In the square by the cathedral the ag- 
gregate color is far lighter. Pure African blood 
hangs chiefly in the outskirts. Then the haughty 
aristocrats of Panama, proud of their own individ- 
ual shade of color, may be seen in the same prome- 
nade with American ladies — even a garrison widow 
or two — from out along the line. Panamanian 
girls gaudily dressed and suggesting to the nostrils 
perambulating drug-stores shuttle back and forth 
with their perfumed dandies. Above the throng pass 
the heads and shoulders of unemotional, self-pos- 




' U^ 11 



1^ 



■?'-^ — .ilgS 




k Zoners" forced to live in box-cars are furnished all the comforts of home 




'The Chief" addresses the "crack shots" at the target range 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 £39 

sessed Americans, erect and soldierly. Sergeant 
Jack of Ancon station was sure to be there 
in his faultless civilian garb, a figure neat but not 
gaudy; and even busy Lieutenant Long was known 
to break away from his stacked-up duties and his 
black stenographer and come to overtop all else 
in the square save the palm-trees whispering to- 
gether in the evening breeze between the num- 
bers. 

There is no favoritism in Zone police work. Every 
crime reported receives full investigation, be it only 
a Greek laborer losing a pair of trousers or — 

There was the case that fell to me early in May, 
for instance. A box billed from New York to Peru 
had been broken open on Balboa dock and — one 
bottle of cognac stolen. Unfortunately the matter 
was turned over to me so long after the perpetration 
of the dastardly crime that the possible culprits 
among the dock hands had wholly recovered from 
the probable consumption of the evidence. But I 
succeeded in gathering material for a splendid type- 
written report of all I had not been able to un- 
earth, to file away among other priceless head- 
quarters' archives. 

Not that the Z. P. has not its big jobs. The 
force to a man distinctly remembers that absorbing 
two months between the escape of wild black Felix 
Paul and the day they dragged him back into the 
penitentiary. No less fresh in memory are the expe- 



240 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

ditions against Maurice Pelote, or Francois Barduc, 
the murderer of Miraflores. All Martinique negroes, 
be it noted; and of all things on this earth, in- 
cluding greased pigs, the hardest to catch is a 
Martinique criminal. After all, four or five murders 
on the Zone in three years is no startling record in 
such a swarm of nationalities. 

Cases large and small which it would be neither 
of interest nor politic to detail poured in during 
the following weeks. Among them was the counter- 
feit case unearthed by some Shylock Holmes on the 
Panamanian force, that called for a long perspiring 
hunt for the " plant " in odd corners of the Zone. 

Then there was , an ex-Z. P. who lost his three 

years' savings on the train, for which reason I 
shadowed a well-known American — for it is a Z. P. 
rule that no one is above suspicion — about Panama 
afoot and in carriages nearly all night, in true 
dime-novel fashion. There was the day that I was 
given a dangerous convict to deliver at Culebra Peni- 
tentiary. The criminal was about three feet long, 
jet black, his worldly possessions comprising two 
more or less garments, one reaching as far down as 
his knees and the other as far up as the base of his 
neck. He had long been a familiar sight to " Zon- 
ers " among the swarm of bootblacks that infest the 
corner near the P. R. R. station. He claimed to be 
eleven, and looked it. But having already served 
time for burglary and horse-stealing, his conviction 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 241 

for stealing a gold necklace from a negro washer- 
woman of San Miguel left the Chief Justice no choice 
but to send him to meditate a half-year at Culebra. 
There is no reform school on the Zone. The few 
American minors who have been found guilty of mis- 
doing have been banished to their native land. 
When the deputy warden had sufficiently recovered 
from the shock brought upon him by the sight of his 
new charge to give me a receipt for him, I raced for 
the noon train back to the city. 

Thereon I sat down beside Pol — First-Class Po- 
liceman X , surprised to find him off duty and in 

civilian clothes. There was a dreamy, far-away look 
in his eyes, and not until the train was racing past 
Rio Grande reservoir did he turn to confide to me 
the following extraordinary occurrence: 

" Last night I dreamed old Judge had my 

father and my mother up before him. On the stand 
he asked my mother her age — and the funny part 
of it is my mother has been dead over ten years. 
She turned around and wrote on the wall with a 
piece of chalk c 1859,' the year she was born. Then 
my father was called and he wrote ' 1853.' That 's 
all there was to the dream. But take.it from me 
I know what it means. Now just add 'em together, 
and multiply by five — because I could see five 
people in the court-room — divide by two — father 
and mother — and I get — ," he drew out a 
crumpled " arrest " form covered with penciled fig- 



242 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

ures, " — 9280. And there — " his voice dropped 
low, " — is jour winning number for next Sunday." 

So certain was this, that First-Class X had 

bribed another policeman to take his eight-hour 
shift, dressed in his vacation best, bought a ticket 
to Panama and return, with real money at tourist 
prices, and would spend the blazing afternoon seek- 
ing among the scores of vendors in the city for lot- 
tery ticket 9280. And if he did not find it there 
he certainly paid his fare all the way to Colon and 
back to continue his search. I believe he at length 
found and acquired the whole ticket, for the custom- 
ary sum of $2.50. But there must have been a slip 
in the arithmetic, or mother's chalk ; for the winning 
number that Sunday was 8895. 

Frequent as are these melancholy errors, scores 
of " Zoners " cling faithfully to their arithmetical 
superstitions. Many a man spends his recreation 
hours working out the winning numbers by some 
secret recipe of his own. There are men on the 
Z. P. who, if you can get them started on the sub- 
ject of lottery tickets, will keep it up until you run 
away, showing you the infallibility of their various 
systems, believing the drawing to be honest, yet ob- 
livious to the fact that both the one and the other 
cannot be true. Dreams are held in special favor. It 
ig probably safe to assert that one-half the num- 
bers over 1,000 and under 10,000 that appear in 
Zone dreams are snapped up next day in lottery 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 243 

tickets. Many have systems of figuring out the all- 
important number from the figures on engines and 
cars. More than one Zone housewife has slipped 
into the kitchen to find the roast burning and her 
West Indian cook hiding hastily behind her ample 
skirt a long list of the figures on every freight-car 
that has passed that morning, from which by some 
Antillian miscalculation and the murmuring of cer- 
tain invocations she was to find the magic number 
that would bring her cooking days to an end. 

Yet there is sometimes method in their madness. 
Did not " Joe " who slept in the next room to me 
at Gatun " hit Duque for two pieces " — which is 
to say he had $3,000 to sprinkle along with his 
police salary? Yet personally the only really ap- 
pealing " system " was that of Cristobal. Upon 
his arrival on the Isthmus four years ago he 
picked out a number at random, took out a yearly 
subscription to it, and thought no more about it 
than one does of a newspaper delivered at the door 
each morning — until one Monday during this month 
of May, after he had squandered something over 
$500, on worthless bits of paper, he strolled into the 
lottery office and was handed an inconspicuous lit- 
tle bag containing $7,500 in yellow gold. 

Like all Z. P. "rookies" (recruits) I had been 
warned early to beware the " sympathy dodge." 
But experience is the only real teacher. One after- 
noon I bestraddled a crazy, stilt-legged Jamaican 



244 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

horse to go out into the bush beyond the Panama 
line to fetch and deliver a citizen of that sovereign 
republic who was wanted on the Zone for horse- 
stealing. At the town of Sabanas, where those 
Panamanians who have bagged the most loot since 
American occupation have their " summer " homes, 
— giddy, brick-painted monstrosities among the 
great trees, deep green foliage and brilliant flower- 
beds (pause a moment and think of brilliant red 
houses in the tropics ; it will make you better ac- 
quainted with the " Spig") I dropped in at the po- 
lice station for ice-water and information. I found 
it in charge of a negro policeman who knew noth- 
ing, and had forgotten that. When, therefore, it 
also chanced that an officer of the Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals stopped before 
the gate with a coachman of Panama, it fell upon 
me to assume command. The horse was the usual 
emaciated rat of an animal indigenous to Panama 
City. When overhauled, the driver was beating the 
animal uphill on his way to Old Panama to bring 
back a party of tourists visiting the ruins. How he 
expected the decrepit beast to carry four more per- 
sons was a mystery. When the harness was lifted 
there was disclosed the expected half-dozen large 
raw sores. We tied the animal in the shade near 
hay and water and adjourned to the station. 

The coachman, a weary, unshaven Spaniard whose 
red eyelids showed lack of sleep, was weeping co- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 245 

piously. He claimed to be a madrileno — which was 
evident; that he had been a coachman in Spain and 
Panama all his life without ever before having been 
arrested — which was possible. He was merely one 
of many drivers for a livery-stable owner in Panama. 
Ordered to go for the tourists, he had called his em- 
ployer's attention to the danger of crossing Zone 
territory with a horse in that condition; but the 
owner had ordered him to cover up the sores with 
pads and harness and drive along. 

It was a very sad case. Here was a poor, honest 
coachman struggling to support a wife and I don't 
recall how many children, but any number sounds 
quite reasonable in Panama, who was about to be 
punished for the fault of another. The paradox of 
honest and coachman did not strike me until later. 
He was certainly telling the truth — you come to 
recognize it readily in all ordinary cases after a 
few weeks in plain clothes. The real culprit was, 
of course, the employer. My righteous wrath de- 
manded that he and not his poor serf be punished. 
I could not release the driver. But I would see that 
the truth was brought out in court next morning 
and a warrant sworn out against the owner. With 
showering tears and rib-shaking sobs the coachman 
promised to tell the judge the whole story. I went 
through him, and locking him up with assurances of 
my deepest sympathy and full assistance, stilted on 
toward the little village of shacks scattered out of 



246 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

sight among the hills, and valleys across the bor- 
der. 

Coachman, witnesses, and arresting officer, to say 
nothing of horse, carriage, and sores were on hand 
when court opened next morning. As I expected, 
the judge failed to ask the poor fellow a single ques- 
tion that would bring out the complicity of his em- 
ployer; did not in fact discover there was an em- 
ployer. I asked to be sworn, and gave the true 
version of the case. The judge listened earnestly. 
When I had ended, he recalled the coachman. The 
latter expressed his astonishment that I should have 
made any such statements. He denied them in toto. 
His employer had nothing whatever to do with the 
case. The fault was entirely his, and no one else 
was in the remotest degree connected with the mat- 
ter. 

" Five dollars ! " snapped the judge. 

The coachman paid, hitched up the rat of a horse, 
and wabbled away into Panama. 

Police business, taking me down into " the Grove " 
that night, I found the driver, clean-shaven and 
better dressed, waiting for fares before the princi- 
pal house of that section. 

" What kind of a game — ," I began. 

" Senor," he cried, and tears again seemed on the 
point of falling, "every word I told you was true. 
But of course I could n't testify against the patron. 
He 'd discharge me and blackmail me, and you know 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 247 

I have a wife and innumerable children to support. 
Come on over and have a drink." 

This justice business, one soon learns, is of the 
same infallible stuff as the rest of life. After all 
it is only the personal opinion of the judge between 
two persons swearing on oath to diametrically op- 
posed statements; and for all the impressiveness of 
deep furrowed brows I did not find that the average 
judge had any more power of reading human nature 
than the average of the rest of us. I well remem- 
ber the morning when a meek little Panamanian was 
testifying in his own behalf, in Spanish of course, 
when the judge broke in without even asking for a 
translation of the testimony: 

" That '11 do ! Because of your gestures I be- 
lieve you are trying to bunco this court. You are 
lying - — tell him that," this to the negro interpreter ; 
and he therewith sentenced the witness to jail. 

As if any Panamanian could talk earnestly of 
anything without waving his arms about him. 

The telephone-bell rang one afternoon. It was 
always doing that, twenty-four hours a day; but 
this time it sounded especially sharp and insistent. 
In the adjoining room, over the "blotter," snapped 
the brusk stereotyped nasal reply: 

" Ancon ! Bingham talking ! " 

The instrument buzzed a moment and the deskman 
looked up to say: 

" ' Andy ' and a nigger just fell over into Pedro 



248 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Miguel locks. They 're sending in his body. The 
nigger lit on his head and hurt his leg." 

His body ! How uncanny it sounded ! " Andy," 
that bunch of muscles who had made such short 
work of the circus wrestler in Gatun and whom I 
had seen not twenty-four hours before bubbling with 
life was now a " body." Things happen quickly on 
the Zone, and he whom the fates have picked to go 
generally shows no hesitation in his exit. But at 
least a man who dies for the I. C. C. has the affairs he 
left behind him attended to in a thorough manner. 
In ten minutes to a half-hour one of the Z. P. is 
on the ground taking note of every detail of the ac- 
cident. A special train or engine rushes the body 
to the morgue in Ancon hospital grounds. A cor- 
oner's jury is soon meeting under the chairmanship 
of a policeman, long reports of everything concern- 
ing the victim or the accident are soon flowing Ad- 
ministration-ward. The police accident report is de- 
tailed and in triplicate. There is sure to be in the 
" personal files " at Culebra a history of the de- 
ceased and the names of his nearest relative or friend 
both on the Isthmus and in the States; for every 
employee must make out his biography at the time 
of his engagement. There are men whose regular 
duty it is to list and take care of his possessions 
down to the last lead pencil, and to forward them 
to the legal heirs. A year's pay goes to his family 
— were as much required of every employer and his 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 249 

the burden of proving the accident the fault of the 
employee, how the safety appliances in factories 
would multiply. There is a man attached to Ancon 
hospital whose unenviable duty it is to write a let- 
ter of condolence to the relatives in the States. 

And so the " Kangaroos " or the " Red Men " or 
whatever his lodge was filed behind the I. C. C. 
casket to the church in Ancon, and " Andy " was 
laid away under another of the simple white iron 
crosses that thickly populate many a Zone hillside, 
and he was charged up to the big debit column of 
the costs of the canal. On the cross is his new 
number ; for officially a " Zoner " is always a num- 
ber; that of the brass-check he wears as a watch- 
charm alive, that at the head of his grave when his 
canal-digging is over. 

Late one unoccupied afternoon I picked up the 
path behind the Administration Building and, skirt- 
ing a Zone residence, began to climb that famous 
oblong mound that dominates the Pacific end of the 
landscape from every direction, — Ancon Hill. For 
a way a fairly steep and stony path lead through 
thick undergrowth. Then this ceased, and a far 
steeper trail zigzagged up the face of the bare moun- 
tain, covered only with thin dead grass. The set- 
ting sun cast its shadow obliquely across the summit 
when I reached it, — a long ridge, with groves of 
trees, running off abruptly toward the sea. On the 
opposite side Uncle Sam was cutting away a whole 



250 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

side of the hill. But the five o'clock whistle had 
blown, and whole armies of little workmen swarmed 
across all the landscape far below, and silence soon 
settled down save for the dredges at Balboa that 
chug on through the night. But for myself the hill 
was wholly unpeopled. A sturdy ocean breeze 
swept steadily across it. The sinking sun set the 
jungle afire in a spot that would have startled those 
who do not know that it rises in the Pacific at Pan- 
ama, crude, glaring colors glowed, fading to gentler 
and more delicate tints, then the evening shadow 
that had climbed the hill with me spread like a great 
black veil over all the world. 

But the moon nearing its full followed almost on 
the heels of the setting sun and, casting its half- 
day over a scene rich in nature and history, invited 
the eye to swing clear round the hazy circle. Be- 
low lay Panama dully rumbling with night traffic. 
Silent Ancon, still better lighted, cuddled upon the 
lower skirts of the hill itself. Then beyond, the 
curving bay, half seen, half guessed, with its long 
promontory dying away into the hazy moonlit dis- 
tance, lighted up here and there by bush fires in 
the jungled hills. Some way out winked the cluster 
of lights that marked Las Sabanas. In front, the 
placid Pacific, the " South Sea. " of the Spaniards, 
spread dimly away into the void of night, its several 
islands seen only by the darker darkness that marked 
where they lay. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 253 

On the other side of the hill the rumble of cranes 
and night labor came up from Balboa dock. There, 
began the canal, which the eye could follow away 
into the dim hilly inland distance — and come upon 
a great cluster of lights that was Corozal, then 
another group that was Miraflores, close followed 
by those of Pedro Miguel; and yet further, rising 
to such height as to be almost indistinguishable 
from the lower stars the lights of the negro cabins 
of upper Paraiso twinkled dimly above a broad glow 
that was Paraiso itself. There the vista ended. 
For at Paraiso the canal turns to the left for its 
plunge through Culebra hill, and all that follows, — 
Empire, Cascadas, and far Gatun, was visible only 
in the imagination. 

If only the film of time might roll back and there 
pass again before our eyes all that has come to pass 
within sight of Ancon hilltop. Across the bay there, 
where now are only jungle-tangled ruins, Pizarro 
set out with his handful of vagabonds to conquer 
South America ; there old Buccaneer Morgan laid his 
bloody hand. Back in the hills there men died by 
scores trying to carry a ship across the Isthmus, 
the Spanish viceroys passed with their rich trains, 
there on some unknown knoll Balboa reached four 
hundred years ago the climax of a career that began 
with stowing away in a cask and ended under the 
headsman's ax — no end of it, down to the " Forty- 
niners " going hopefully out and returning filled 



254 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

with gold or disease, or leaving their bones here in 
the jungle before they really were " Forty-niners "; 
on down to the railroad days with men wading in 
swamps with survey kits, and frequently lying down 
to die. Then if a bit of the future, too, could for 
a moment be unveiled, and one might watch the first 
ship glide majestically and silently into the canal 
and away into the jungle like some amphibious mon- 
ster. 

It was along in those days that we were looking 
for a " murderous assaulter." At a Saturday night 
dance in a native shack back in Miraflores bush the 
usual riot had broken out about midnight and a 
revolver had come into play. As a result there was a 
Peruvian mulatto up in Ancon hospital who had been 
shot through the mouth, the bullet being somewhere 
in his neck. It became my frequent duty, among 
other Z. P.'s, to take suspects up the hill for possible 
identification. 

One morning I strolled into the station and fell to 
laughing. The early train had brought in on sus- 
picion a Spanish laborer of twenty or twenty-two ; a 
pretty, girlish chap with huge blue eyes over which 
hung long black lashes like those painted on Niirn- 
berg dolls. No one with a shadow of faith in human 
nature left would have believed him capable of any 
crime ; any one at all acquainted with Spaniards must 
have known he could not shoot a hare, would in fact 
be afraid to fire off a gun. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 255 

The fear in his big blue eyes struggled with his 
ingenuous, girlish smile as I marched him through 
the long hall full of white beds and darker inmates. 
The Peruvian sat bolstered up in his cot, a stoical, 
revengeful glare on his reddish-brown swollen face. 
He gazed a long minute at the boy's face, across 
which flitted the flush of fear and embarrassment, at 
the big doll's eyes, then shook a raised forefinger 
slowly back and forth before his nose — the nega- 
tive of Spanish-speaking peoples. Then he groaned, 
spat in a tin-can beside him, and called for paper 
and pencil. In the note-book I handed him he wrote 
in atrociously spelled Spanish: 

" The man that came to the dance with this man 
is the man that shot me with a bullet." 

The blue : eyed boy promised to point out his com- 
panion of that night. We took the 10:55 and 
reached Pedro Miguel during the noon hour. Down 
in a box-car camp between the railroad and the canal 
the boy called for " Jose " and there presented him- 
self immediately a tall, studious, solemn-faced 
Spaniard of spare frame, about forty, dressed 
in overalls and working shirt. Here was even less 
a criminal type than the boy. 

" Seilor," I asked, " did you go to the dance in 
Miraflores last Saturday night with this youth? " 

" Si, seilor." 

" Then I j,lace you under arrest. We will take 
the one o'clock train." 



256 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

He opened his mouth to protest, but closed it 
again without having uttered a sound. He opened 
it a second time, then sat suddenly down on the low 
edge of the box-car porch. A more genuinely aston- 
ished man I have never seen. No actor could have 
approached it. Still, whatever my own conviction, 
it was my business to bring him before his accuser. 
After a time he recovered sufficiently to ask permis- 
sion to change his clothes, and disappeared in one 
of the resident box-cars. The boy was already being 
fed in another. Had my prisoners been of almost 
any one of the other seventy-one nationalities I 
should not have thought of letting them out of my 
sight. But the Zone Spaniard's respect for law is 
proverbial. 

" Jose! Pinched Jose! " cried his American boss, 
when I explained that he would find himself a man 
short that afternoon. " You people are sure bark- 
ing up the wrong tree this time. Why, Jose has 
been my engineer for over two years, and the steadi- 
est man on the Zone. He writes for some Spanish 
paper and tells 'em the truth over there so straight 
that the rest of 'em down here, the anarchists and 
all that bunch, are aching to get him into trouble. 
But they '11 never get anything on Jose. Have 
him tell you about it in Spanish if you sabe the 
lingo." 

But Jose was a gallego, whence instead of the 
voluble flood of protesting words one expects from a 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 257 

Spaniard on such an occasion, he wrapped himself 
in a stoical silence. Not until we were on our way 
to the railroad station did I get him to talk. Then 
he explained in quiet, unflowery, gestureless language. 

He had come to the Canal Zone chiefly to gather 
literary material. Not being a man of wealth, how- 
ever, nor one satisfied with superficial observation, 
he had sought employment at his trade as stationary 
engineer. Besides laying in a stock for more impor- 
tant writing he hoped to do in the future, he was 
Zone correspondent of " El Liberal " of Madrid and 
other Spanish cities. In the social life of his fellow- 
countrymen on the Isthmus he had taken no part, 
whatever. He was too busy. He did not drink. 
He could not dance ; he saw no sense in squandering 
time in such frivolities. But ever since his arrival 
he had been promising himself to attend one of 
these wild Saturday-night debauches in the edge of 
the jungle that he might use a description of it in 
some later work. So he had coaxed his one personal 
friend, the boy, to go with him. It was virtually 
the one thing besides work that he had ever done on 
the Zone. They had stayed two hours, and had left 
the moment the trouble began. Yet here he was ar- 
rested. 

I bade him cheer up, to consider the trip to Ancon 
merely an afternoon excursion on government pass. 
He remained downcast. 

" But think of the experience J " I cried. " Now 



258 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

you can tell exactly how it feels to be arrested — 
first-hand literary material." 

But he was not philosopher enough to look at it 
from that point of view. To his Spanish mind arrest, 
even in innocence, was a disgrace for which no 
amount of " material " could compensate. It is a 
common failing. How many of us set out into the 
world for experience, yet growl with rage or sit 
downcast and silent all the way from Pedro Miguel to 
Panama if one such experience gives us a rough half- 
hour, or robs us of ten minutes sleep. 

At the hospital the Peruvian gurgled and spat, 
beckoned for paper and wrote : 

" This is the man." 

"What man?" I asked. 

" The man who came with that man," he scribbled, 
nodding his heavy face toward the blue-eyed boy. 

" But is this the man that shot you? " I demanded. 

" The man who came with that man is the one," he 
scrawled. 

"Well, then this is the man that shot you?" I 
cried. 

But he would not answer definitely to that, but sat 
a long time glaring out of his swollen, vindictive 
countenance propped up in his pillows at the tall, 
solemn correspondent. By and by he motioned again 
for paper. 

" I think so. I am not sure," he miswrote. 

I did not think so, and as the sum total of his 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 259 

descriptions of his assailant during the past several 
days amounted to " a tall man, rather short, with a 
face and two eyes " — he was very insistent about 
the eyes, which is the reason the doll-eyed boy had 
fallen into the drag-net — I permitted myself to ac- 
cept my own opinion as evidence. The Peruvian was 
in all likelihood in no condition to recognize a man 
from a loup-garou by the time the fracas started. 
Much ardent water had flowed that night. I took 
the suspects down to Ancon station and let them 
cool off in porch rocking-chairs. Then I gave them 
passes back to Pedro Miguel for the evening train. 
The doll-eyed boy smiled girlishly upon me as he 
descended the steps, but the correspondent strode 
slowly away with the downcast, cheerless countenance 
of a man who has been hurt beyond recovery. 

There were strangely contrasted days in the 
" gum-shoe's " calendar. Two examples taken al- 
most at random will give the idea. On May twen- 
tieth I lolled all day in a porch rocker at Ancon 
station, reading a novel. Along in the afternoon 
Corporal Castillo drifted in. For a time he stood 
leaning against the desk-rail, his felt hat pushed far 
back on his head, his eyes fixed on some point in the 
interior of China. Then suddenly he snatched up 
a sheet of I. C. C. stationery, dropped down at a 
typewriter, and wrote at express speed a letter in 
Spanish. Next he grasped a telephone and, in the 
words of the deskman, " spit Spig into the 'phone " 



260 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

for several minutes. That over he caught up an 
envelope, sealed the letter and addressed it. An in- 
stant later the station was in an uproar looking for 
a stamp. One was found, the Corporal stuck it on 
the letter, fell suddenly motionless and stared for a 
long time at vacancy. Then a new thought struck 
him. He jerked open a drawer of the " gum-shoe " 
desk, flung the letter inside — where I found it acci- 
dentally one day some weeks afterward — and drop- 
ping into the swivel-chair laid his feet on the 
" gum-shoe " blotter and a moment later seemed to 
have fallen asleep. 

By all of which signs those of us who knew him 
began to suspect that the Corporal had something 
on his mind. Not a few considered him the best 
detective on the force; at least he was different 
enough from a printer's ink detective to be a real 
one. But naturally the strain of heading a de- 
tective bureau for weeks was beginning to wear upon 
him. 

" Damn it ! " said the Corporal suddenly, opening 
his eyes, " I can't be in six places at once. You '11 
have to handle these cases," and he drew from a 
pocket and handed me three typewritten sheets, then 
drifted away into the dusk. I looked them over and 
returned to the porch rocker and the last chapters 
of the novel. 

A meek touch on the leg awoke me at four next 
morning. I looked up to see dimly a black face 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 261 

under a khaki helmet bent over me whispering, " It 
de time, sah," and fade noiselessly away. It was 
the frontier policeman carrying* out his orders of 
the night before. For once there was not a carriage 
in sight. I stumbled sleepily down into Panama 
and for some distance along Avenida Central before 
I was able to hail an all night hawk chasing a worn 
little wreck of a horse along the macadam. I spread 
my lanky form over the worn cushions and we 
spavined along the graveled boundary line, past the 
Chinese cemetery where John can preserve and burn 
joss to his ancestors to the end of time, out through 
East Balboa just awakening to life, and reached 
Balboa docks as day was breaking. I was not long 
there, and the equine caricature ambled the three 
miles back to town in what seemed reasonable time, 
considering. As we turned again into Avenida Cen- 
tral my watch told me there was time and to spare 
to catch the morning passenger. I was not a little 
surprised therefore to hear just then two sharp 
rings on the station gong. I dived headlong into 
the station and brought up against a locked gate, 
caught a glimpse of two or three ladies weeping and 
the tail of the passenger disappearing under the 
bridge. Americans have introduced the untropical 
idea of starting their trains on time, to the disgust 
of the " Spig " in general and the occasional dis- 
comfiture of Americans. I dashed wildly out through 
the station, across Panama's main street, down a 



262 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

rugged lane to the first steps descending to the track, 
and tumbled joyously onto a slowly moving train — 
to discover that it was the Balboa labor-train and 
that the Colon passenger was already half-way to 
Diablo Hill. 

A Panama policeman of dusky hue, leaning against 
a gate-post, eyed me drowsily as I slowly climbed 
the steps, mopping my brow and staring at my watch, 

"What time does that 6:35 train leave?" I de- 
manded. 

" Yo, sefior," he said with ministerial dignity, 
shifting slowly to the other shoulder, " no tengo 
conocimiento de esas cosas " (I have no knowledge 
of those things). 

He probably did not know there is a railroad from 
Panama to Colon. It has only been in operation 
since 1855. 

Later I found the fault lay with my brass watch. 

With a perspiration up for all day I set out along 
the track. Rounding Diablo Hill the realization 
that I was hungry came upon me simultaneously 
with the thought that unless I got through the door 
of Corozal hotel by 7:30 I was likely to remain so. 
Breakfast over, I caught the morning supply-train 
to Miraflores, there to dash through the locks for a 
five-minute interview. I walked to Pedro Miguel and, 
descending from the embankment of the main line, 
" nailed " a dirt-train returning empty and stood 
up for a breezy ride down through the " cut." It 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 263 

was the same old smoky,, toilsome place, a perceptible 
bit lower. As in the case of a small boy only those 
can see its growth who have been away for a time. 
The train stopped with a jerk at the foot of Culebra. 
I walked a half-mile and caught a loaded dirt-train 
to Cascadas. The matter there to be investigated 
required ten minutes. That over, I " got in touch " 
at the nearest telephone, and the Corporal's voice 
called for my immediate presence at headquarters. 
There chanced to be passing through Cascadas at 
that moment a Panama-bound freight, the caboose 
of which caught me up on the fly ; and forty minutes 
later I was racing up the long stairs. 

There I learned among other things that a man 
I was anxious to have a word with was coming in 
on the noon train, but would be unavailable after 
arrival. I sprang into a cab and was soon rolling 
away again, past the Chinese cemetery. At the com- 
missary crossing in East Balboa we were held up by 
an empty dirt-train returning from the dump. I 
tossed a coin at the cabman and scrambled aboard. 
The train raced through Corozal, down the grade 
and around the curve at unslacking speed. I 
dropped off in front of Miraflores police station, 
keeping my feet, thanks to practice and good luck, 
and dashing up through the village, dragged myself 
breathlessly aboard the passenger train as its head 
and shoulders had already disappeared in the tunnel. 

The ticket-collector pointed out my man to me 



264 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

in the first passenger coach, the " ladies' car " — he 
is a school-teacher and tobacco smoke distresses him 
— and by the time we pulled into Panama I had the 
desired information. Dinner was not to be thought 
of; I had barely time to dash through the second- 
class gate and back along the track to Balboa labor- 
train. From the docks a sand-train carried me to 
Pedro Miguel. 

There was a craneman in Bas Obispo " cut " 
whose testimony was wanted. I reached him by 
two short walks and a ride. His statements sug- 
gested the advisability of questioning his room-mate, 
a towerman in Miraflores freight-yards. Luck 

would have it that my chauffeur friend was just 

then passing with an I. C. C. motor-car and only a 
photographer for a New York weekly aboard. I 
found room to squeeze in. The car raced away 
through the " cut," up the declivity, and dropped 
me at the foot of the tower. The room-mate re- 
ferred me to a locomotive engineer and, being a 
towerman, gave me the exact location of his engine. 
I found it at the foot of Cucaracha slide with a train 
nearly loaded. By the time the engineer had added 
his whit of information, we were swinging around 
toward the Pacific dump. I dropped off and, climb- 
ing up the flank of Ancon hill, descended through 
the hospital grounds. 

Where the royal palms are finest and there opens 
out the broadest view of Panama, Ancon, and the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 265 

bay, I gave myself five minutes' pause, after which 
a carriage bore me to a shop near Cathedral Plaza 
where second-hand goods are bought — and no ques- 
tions asked. On the way back to Ancon station I 
visited two similar establishments. 

I had been lolling in the swivel-chair a full ten 
minutes, perhaps, when the telephone rang. It was 
" the Captain " calling for me. When I reached the 
third-story back he handed me extradition papers to 
the Secretary of Foreign Affairs, in Panama. A 
half -hour later, wholly outstripping the manana idea, 
I had signed a receipt for the Jap in question and 
transferred him from Panama to Ancon j ail. Where- 
upon I descended to the evening passenger and rode 
to Pedro Miguel for five minutes' conversa- 
tion, and caught the labor-train Panamaward. At 
Corozal I stepped off for a word with the officer on 
the platform and the labor-train plunged on again, 
after the fashion of labor-trains, spilling the last 
half of its disembarking passengers along the way. 
Ten minutes later the headlight of the last passenger 
swung around the curve and carried me away to 
Panama. 

That might have done for the day, but I had 
gathered a momentum it was hard to check. Not 
long after returning from the police mess to the 
swivel chair a slight omission in the day's program 
occurred to me. I called up Corozal police sta- 
tion. 



266 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

" What? " said a mashed-potato voice at the other 
end of the wire. 

"Who's talking?" 

" Policeman Green, sah." 

" Station commander there? " 

" No, sah. Station commander he gone just over 
to de Y. M. to play billiards, sah. Dey one big 
match on to-night." 

Of course I could have " got " him there. But 
on second thoughts it would be better to see him in 
person and clear up at the same time a little matter 
in one of the labor camps, and not run the risk of 
causing the loss of the billiard championship. Be- 
sides Corozal is cooler to sleep in than Ancon. In 
a black starry night I set out along the invisible 
railroad for the first station. 

An hour later, everything settled to my satisfac- 
tion, I had discovered a vacant bed in Corozal bach- 
elor quarters and was pulling off my coat pre- 
paratory to the shower-bath and a well-earned 
night's repose. Suddenly I heard a peculiar noise 
in the adjoining room, much like that of a seal com- 
ing to the surface after being long under water. 
My curiosity awakened, I sauntered a few feet along 
the veranda. Beside one of the cots stood a short, 
roly-poly little man, the lower third of whom showed 
rosy pink below his bell-shaped white nightie. As 
he turned his face toward the light to switch it off 
I swallowed the roof of my mouth and clawed at the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 267 

clap-boarding for support. It was "the Sloth!" 
He had been transferred. I slipped hastily into my 
coat and, turning up the collar, plunged out into 
the rain and the night and stumbled blindly away 
on weary legs towards Panama. 



CHAPTER IX 

THERE were four of us that Sunday. " Bish " 
and I always went for an afternoon swim un- 
less police or mess duties forbade. Then there was 
Bridgley, who had also once displayed his svelte 
form in a Z. P. uniform to admiring tourists, but 
was now a pursuer of " soldiering " Hindus on Naos 
Island. I wish I could describe Bridgley for you. 
But if you never knew him ten pages would give you 
no clearer idea, and if you ever did, the mere mention 
of the name Bridgley will be full and ample descrip- 
tion. Still, if you must have some sort of a lay fig- 
ure to hang your imaginings on, think of a man 
who always reminds you of a slender, delicate porce- 
lain vase of great antiquity that you know a strong 
wind would smash to fragments, — yet when you ac- 
cidentally swat it off the mantelpiece to the floor it 
bobs up without a crack. Then you grow bolder 
and more curious and jump on it with both feet 
in your hob-nailed boots, and to your astonishment 
it not only does not break but — 

Well, Bridgley was one of us that Sunday after- 
noon ; and then there was " the Admiral," well- 
dressed as always, who turned up at the last mo- 
ment; for which we were glad, as any one would be 

268 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 269 

to have " the Admiral " along. So we descended into 
Panama by the train-guard short-cut and across 
the bridge that humps its back over the P. R. R. 
like a cat in unsocial mood, and on through Cale- 
donia out along the beach sands past the old iron 
hulls about which Panamanian laborers are always 
tinkering under the impression that they are work- 
ing. This time we walked. I don't recall now 
whether it was quarter-cracks, or the Lieutenant 
had n't slept well — no, it could n't have been that, 
for the Lieutenant never let his personal mishaps 
trample on his good nature — or whether " Bish " 
had decided to try to reduce weight. At any rate 
we were afoot, and thereby hangs the tale — or as 
much of a tale as there is to tell. 

We tramped resolutely on along the hard curving 
beach past the disheveled bath-houses before which 
ladies from the Zone gather in some force of a Sun- 
day afternoon. For this time we were really out 
for a swim rather than to display our figures. On 
past the light-brown bathers, and the chocolate- 
colored bathers, and the jet black bathers who 
seemed to consider that color covering enough, till 
we came to the big silent saw-mill at the edge of the 
cocoanut grove that we had been invited long since 
to make a Z. P. dressing-room. 

Before us spread the reposing, powerful, sun- 
shimmering Pacific. Across the bay, clear as an 
etching* lay Panama backed by Ancon hill. In 



270 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 . 

regular cadence the ocean swept in with a hoarse, 
resistless roll on the sands. 

We dived in, keeping an eye out for the sharks we 
knew never come so far in and probably wouldn't 
bite if they did. The sun blazed down white hot 
from a cloudless sky. This time the Lieutenant and 
Sergeant Jack had not been able to come, but we 
arranged the races and jumps on the sand for all 
that, and went into them with a will and — 

A rain-drop fell. Nor was it long lonesome. Be- 
fore we had finished the hundred-yard dash we were 
in the midst of, it was undeniably raining. Half 
a moment later " bucketsful " would have been a 
weak simile. All the pent up four months of an 
extra long rainy season seemed to have been loosed 
without warning. The blanket of water blotted out 
Panama and Ancon hill across the bay, blotted out 
the distant American bathers, then the light-brown 
ones, then the chocolate-tinted, then even the jet 
black ones close at hand. 

We remained under water for a time to keep dry. 
But the rain whipped our faces as with thousands 
of stinging lashes. We crawled out and dashed 
blindly up the bank toward the saw-mill, the rain 
beating on our all but bare skins, feeling as it might 
to stand naked in Miraflores locks and let the sand 
pour down upon us from sixty feet above. When 
at last we stumbled under cover and up the 
stairs to where our clothing hung, it was as if a 




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ZONE POLICEMAN 88 273 

weight of many tons had been lifted from our 
shoulders. 

The saw-mill was without side-walls; consisted 
only of a sheet-iron roof and floors, on the former 
of which the storm pounded with a roar that made 
only the sign language feasible. It was now as if 
we were surrounded on all sides by solid walls of 
water and forever shut off from the outer world — 
if indeed that had survived. Sheets of water 
slashed in further and further across the floor. We 
took to huddling behind beams and under saw-benches 
— the militant storm hunted us out and wetted us 
bit by bit. " The Admiral " and I tucked ourselves 
away on the 45-degree eye-beams up under the roar- 
ing roof. The angry water gathered together in 
columns and swept in and up to soak us. 

At the end of an hour the downpour had increased 
some hundred per cent. It was as if an express 
train going at full speed had gradually doubled its 
rapidity. That was the day when little harmless 
streams tore themselves apart into great gorges and 
left their pathetic little bridges alone and deserted 
out in the middle of the gulf. That was the famous 
May twelfth, 1912, when Ancon recorded the greatest 
rainfall in her history, — 7.23 inches, virtually all 
within three hours. Three of us were ready to sur- 
render and swim home through it. But there was 
" the Admiral " to consider. He was dressed clear 
to his scarf-pin — and Panama tailors tear horrible 



274 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

holes in a police salary. So we waited and dodged 
and squirmed into closer holes for another hour; 
and grew steadily wetter. 

Then at length dusk began to fall, and instead of 
slacking with the day the fury of the storm increased. 
It was then that " the Admiral " capitulated, seeing 
fate plainly in league with his tailor; and wigwag- 
ging the decision to us beside him, he led the 
way down the stairs and dived into the world 
awash. 

Wet? We had not taken the third step before 
we were streaming like fire hose. There was nearly 
an hour of it, splashing knee-deep through what had 
been when we came out little dry sandy hollows; 
steering by guess, for the eye could make out nothing 
fifty yards ahead, even before the cheese-thick dark- 
ness fell ; bowed like nonogenarians under the burden 
of water; staggering back and forth as the storm 
caught us crosswise or the earth gave way under 
us. " The Admiral's " patent-leather shoes — but 
why go into painful details? Those who were in 
Panama on that memorable afternoon can picture 
it all for themselves, and the others will never know. 
The wall of water was as thick as ever when we fought 
our bowed and weary way up over the railroad 
bridge and, summoning up the last strength, splurged 
tottering into " Angelinas." 

When our streaming had so far subsided that 
they recognised us for solvent human beings, encour- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 275 

aging concoctions were set before us. Bridgley, 
fearing the after effects, acquired a further quart 
bottle of protection, and when we had gathered 
force for the last dash we plunged out once more 
toward our several goals. As the door of 111 
slammed behind me, the downpour suddenly slack- 
ened. As I paused before my room to drain, it 
stopped raining. 

I supped on bread, beer, and cheese from over the 
frontier — we had arrived thirty seconds too late 
for Ancon police mess. Then when I had saved 
what was salvable from the Wreckage and reclad in 
such wardrobe as had luckily remained at home, I 
strolled over toward the police station to put in a 
serene and quiet evening. 

But it has long since been established that troubles 
flock together. As I crunched up the gravel walk 
between the hedge-rows, wild riot broke on my ear. 
Ancon police station was in eruption. From the 
Lieutenant to the newest uniformless " rookie " every 
member of the force was swarming in and out of the 
building. The Zone and Panama telephones were 
ringing in their two opposing dialects, the deskman 
was shouting his own peculiar brand of Spanish into 
one receiver and bawling English at the other, all 
hands were diving into old clothes, the most apa- 
thetic of the force were girding up their loins with 
the adventurous fire of the old Moro-hunting days 
in their eyes, and all, some ahorse, more afoot, were 



o 



£76 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

dashing one by one out into the night and the 
jungle. 

It was several minutes before I could catch the 
news. At last it was shouted at me over a telephone. 
Murder ! A white Greek — who ever heard of a col- 
ored Greek? — with a white shirt on had shot a man 
at Pedro Miguel at 6:35. Every road and bypath 
of escape to Panama was already blocked, armed 
men would meet the assassin whatever way he might 
take. I went down to meet the evening train, re- 
solved after that to strike out into the night in the 
random hope of having my share in the chase. It 
had begun to rain again, but only moderately, as 
if it realized it could never again equal the afternoon 
record. 

Then suddenly the excitement exploded. It was 
only a near-murder. Two Colombians had been shot, 
but would in all probability recover. The news 
reached me as I stood at the second-class gate scan- 
ning the faces of the great multicolored river of 
passengers that poured out into the city. For two 
hours, one by one with crestfallen mien, the man- 
hunters leaked back into Ancon station and, the case 
having dwindled to one of regular daily routine, by 
eleven we were all abed. 

In the morning the " Greek chase " fell to me. 
More detailed description of the culprit had come 
in during the night, including the bit of information 
that he was a bad man from the Isle of Crete. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 Til 

The belt-straining No. 38 oiled and loaded, I set off 
on an assignment that was at least a relief after 
pursuing stolen necklaces for negro women, or crow- 
bars lost by the I. C. C. 

By nine I was climbing to Pedro Miguel police 
station on its knoll with the young Greek who had 
exchanged hats with the assassin after the crime. 
That afternoon a volunteer joined me. He was a 
friend of the wounded men, a Peruvian black as jade, 
but without a suggestion of the negro in anything 
but his outward appearance. He was of the size 
and build of a Sampson in his prime, spoke a Spanish 
so clear-cut it seemed to belie his African blood, and 
had the restless vigor acquired in a youth of tramping 
over the Andine ranges. 

I piled him into a cab and we rolled away to East 
Balboa, to climb upon an empty dirt-train and drop 
off as it raced through Miraflores, the sturdy legs 
of the Peruvian saving him where his practice would 
not have. Up in the bush between Pedro Miguel 
and Paraiso we found a hut where the Greek had 
stopped for water and gone on up a gully. We set 
out to follow, mounting partly on hands and knees, 
partly dragging ourselves by grass and bushes up 
what had been and would soon be again a torrential 
mountain stream. For hours we tore through the 
jungle, up hills steeper than the path of righteous- 
ness, following now a few faint foot-prints or 
trampled bushes, now a hint from some native bush 



218 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

dweller. The rain outside vied with the sweat within 
as to which would first soak us through. To make 
things merrier I had not only to wear an arsenal but 
a coat atop to conceal it from the general public. 

To mention the holes I crawled into and the clues 
I followed during the next few days would be more 
tiresome than a Puritan prayer. By day I was dash- 
ing back and forth through all Ancon district, by 
night prowling about the grimier sections of Panama 
city. Almost daily I got near enough to sniff the 
prey. Now it was a Greek confectioner on Avenida 
Central who admitted that the fugitive had called 
on him during the night, now a Panamanian pesquisa 
whose stool-pigeon had seen him out in the bush, 
then the information that he had stopped to shave 
and otherwise alter his appearance in some shack 
half-way across the Zone and afterward struck off 
for Panama by an unused route. The clues were 
pendulum-like. They took me a half-dozen times at 
least out the winding highway to Corozal, on to 
Miraflores and even further. The rainy season and 
the reign of umbrellas had come. It had been form- 
ally opened on that memorable Sunday afternoon. 
There was still sunshine at times, but always a wet 
season heaviness to the atmosphere; and the rains 
were already giving the rolling jungle hills a tinge 
of new green. There was nothing to be gained by 
hurrying. The fugitive was as likely to crawl forth 
from one place as another along the rambling road. 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 279 

Here I paused to kill a lizard or to watch the clumsy 
march of one of the huge purple and many-colored 
land-crabs, there to gaze away across a jungled 
valley soft and fuzzy in the humid air like some 
Corot painting. 

I even sailed for San Francisco in the quest. For 
of course each outgoing ship must be searched. One 
day I had word that a " windjammer " was about to 
sail ; and racing out to Balboa I was soon set aboard 
the fore and aft schooner Meteor far out in the 
bay. When I plunged down into the cabin the 
peeled-headed German captain was seated at a table 
before a heap of " Spig " dollars, paying off his 
black shore hands. He solemnly asserted he had no 
Greek aboard, and still more solemnly swore that if 
he found one stowed away b° would turn him over 
to the police in San Francisco — which was kind of 
him but would not have helped matters. There are 
several men running gaily about San Francisco 
streets who would be very welcome in certain quarters 
on the Zone and sure of lodging and food for a 
long time to come. 

By this time the tug Bolivar had us in tow, the 
captain went racing over his ship like any of his 
crew, tugging at the ropes, and we were gliding out 
across Panama bay, past the little greening islands, 
the curving panorama of the city and Ancon hill 
growing smaller and smaller behind — bound for 
'Frisco, What ho! the merry "windjammer" with 



280 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

her stowed sails and smell of tar awakened within 
me old memories, hungry and grimy for the most 
part. But this was no independent, self-respecting 
member of the Wind-wafted sisterhood. Far out in 
the offing lay a steamer of the same line that was 
to tow the Meteor to the Golden Gate! How is the 
breed of sailors fallen! The few laborers aboard 
would take an occasional wheel, pick oakum, and 
yarn their unadventurous yarns. As we drew near, a 
boat was lowered to set me aboard the steamer, to 
the rail-crowding surprise of her passengers, who 
fancied they had hours since seen the last of Zone 
and " Zoners." The captain asserted he had nothing 
aboard grown nearer Greece than three Irishmen, 
any one of whom — f acetiousness seemed to be one 
of the captain's characteristics — I might have and 
welcome. A few moments later I was back aboard 
the tug waving farewell to steamer and " windjam- 
mer " as they pushed away into the twilight sea, and 
the Bolivar turned shoreward. 

I received a " straight tip " one evening that the 
fugitive Greek was hiding in a hovel on the Cruces 
trail. What part of the Cruces trail, the informant 
did not hint ; but he described the hut in some detail. 
So next morning as the thick gray dawn of this 
tropical land was melting into day, I descended at 
Bas Obispo, through the canal to Gamboa and struck 
off into the dense dripping jungle. The rainy season 
had greened things up and gone — temporarily, of 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 281 

course, for in a day or two it would be on us again 
in all tropical fury. In the few days since the first 
rain the landscape had changed like a theater decora- 
tion, a green not even to be imagined in the temperate 
zone. 

It turned out that the ancient village of Cruces 
was a mere two-mile stroll from the canal, a thatch- 
roofed native town of some thirty dwellings on the 
rocky shore of an inner curve of the Chagres, where 
travelers from Balboa to the last " Forty-niner " 
disembarked from their thirty-six mile ride up the 
river and struck on along the ten-mile road through 
the jungle to Panama — the famous Cruces trail. 
Except for its associations the village was without 
interest — except some personal Greek interest. 
Sour looks were chiefly my portion, for the villagers 
have never taken kindly to Americans. 

I soon sought out the trail, here a mere path un- 
dulating through rank, wet-hot, locust singing jun- 
gle. Here in the tangled somber mystery of the 
wilderness grew every tropical thing ; countless giant 
ferns, draping tangles of vines, the mango tree with 
its rounded dome of leaves like the mosque of Omar 
done in greenery, the humble pine-apple with its 
unproportionate fruit, everywhere the banana, king 
of vegetables, clothed in its own immense leaves, the 
frondy zapote, now and then in a hollow a clump of 
yellowish-green bamboo, though not numerous or 
nearly so large as in many another tropical land, 



282 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

above all else the symmetrical Gothic fronds of the 
palm nodding in a breeze the more humble vegetation 
could not know. The constant music of insect life 
sounded in my ears ; everywhere were flowers of bril- 
liant hue, masses of bush blossoms not unlike the 
lilac in appearance, but like all down on the Isthmus, 
odorless — or rather with a pungent scent, like 
strong catsup. 

Four months earlier I should have been chary of 
diving back into the Panamanian " bush " alone, 
above all on a criminal hunt. But it needs only a 
little time on the Zone to make one laugh at the 
absurd stories of danger from the bush native that 
are even yet appearing in many U. S. papers. They 
are not over friendly to whites, it is true. But they 
were all of that familiar languid Central American 
type, blinking at me apathetically out of the shade 
of their huts, crowding to one edge of the trail as 
I passed, eying me silently, a bit morosely, somewhat 
frightened because their experience of Americans is 
of a discourteous creature who shouts at them in a 
strange tongue and swears at them because they do 
not understand it. The moment they heard their 
own customary greetings they changed to children 
delighted to do anything to oblige — even to the ex- 
tent of dragging their indolent forms erect to lead 
the way a quarter-mile through the bush to some 
isolated shack. Far from contemplating any injury, 
all these wayward children of the jungle ask is to 






'Any hut might he a hiding-place" 




Cruces on the Chagres 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 285 

be let alone to drift through life in their own way. 
Still more absurd is the notion of danger from wild 
beasts — other than the tiny wild beast that burrows 
its painful way under the skin. 

So I pushed on, halting at many huts to make 
covert inquiries. It was a joyous, brilliant day over- 
head. Down in the dense, rampant, singing jungle 
I sweated profusely — and enjoyed it. Choking for 
a drink in a hutless section, I took one of the crooked, 
tunnel-like trails to the left in the direction of the 
Chagres. But it squirmed off through thick jungle, 
through banana groves and untended pine-apple gar- 
dens to come out at last at an astonished hut on a 
knoll, from which was not to be seen a sign of the 
river. I crawled through another struggling side- 
trail further on and this time reached the stream, 
but at a bank too sheer and bush-matted to descend. 
The third attempt brought me to where the river 
made a graceful bend at my feet and I descended an 
abrupt jungle bank to drink and stroll a bit along 
the stony shore ; then plunged in for a swim. It was 
just the right temperature, with dense jungle banks 
on either side like great green unscalable walls, the 
water clear and a bit over waist deep in the middle 
of the stream. Now and then around the one or 
the other bend came a cayuca, the native dug-out 
made of the hollowed trunk of a tree, usually the 
cedro — though to a jungle native any tree is a 
" cedro " if he does not happen to think of its right 



m ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

name. Twenty to thirty feet long, sometimes piled 
high with vegetables, sometimes with several natives 
seated Indian file in the bottom, the gunwales a bare 
two or three inches above the water, they needed nice 
management, especially in the rapids below Cruces. 
The locomotive power, generally naked to the waist, 
stood up in the craft and climbed his polanca, or 
long pike pole, hand over hand, every naked brown 
muscle in play, moving in perfect rhythm and ap- 
parent ease even up-stream against the powerful 
current. 

Soon after Chagres and trail parted company, the 
former to wind on up through the jungle hills to its 
birthplace in the land of Darien and wild Indians, 
the latter to strike for the Pacific. Over a mildly 
rough country it led, down into tangled ravines, up 
over dense forested hillocks where the jungle had been 
fought back by Uncle Sam and on the brows of which 
I halted to drink of the fresh breeze sweeping across 
from the Atlantic, All this time not a suggestion of 
anything Greek, though I managed by some simple 
strategy to cast a sweeping glance into every hovel 
along the way. 

Then came the real Cruces trail — the rest only 
follows the general direction. I fell upon it unex- 
pectedly. It is still there as it was when the Peru- 
vian viceroys and their glittering trains clattered 
along it, surprisingly well preserved ; a cobbled way 
some three feet wide of that rough and bumpy variety 



ZONE POLICEMAN 83 287 

the Spaniard even to-day fancies a real road, broken 
in places but still well marked, leading away south- 
ward through the wilderness. 

Overhead were tall spreading trees laden with blos- 
somless orchids. Under some of them was broad 
grassy shade ; but the surrounding wall of vegetation 
cut off all breeze. The way was intersected by many 
roads of leaf-cutting ants, as level, wide and well- 
built in their proportion as the old Roman high- 
ways, with such an industrious throng going and 
coming upon them as one could find nowhere 
equaled, unless it be on the Grand Trunk Road of 
India. 

Then suddenly there appeared the hut ffiat had 
been described to me. I surrounded it and, hand 
upon the butt of my No. 38, closed in upon the 
place, then rushed it with all forces. 

There was not a sign of human life in the vicinity. 
The door was tied shut with a single strand of old 
rope, but there was no question that the fugitive 
might be hiding inside, for the reed walls had holes 
in them large enough to drive a sheep through, and 
there was nothing within to hide behind. I thrust 
an arm through an opening and dragged the large 
and heavy earthenware water- jar to me for a drink, 
and pushed on. 

Squatter's cabins were now appearing, as con- 
trasted with the native bushman's peaked hut ; sleep- 
ing-places thrown together of tin cans, boxes and 



288 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

jungle rubbish, many negro shanties built of I. C. C. 
scraps — all of which announced the vicinity of the 
canal. Any hut might be a hiding-place. I made 
ostensibly casual inquiries, interlarded between 
stories, at several of them, and at length established 
that the Greek had been there not long before, but 
was elsewhere now. Then about four of the after- 
noon I burst out suddenly in sight of a broad mod- 
ern highway, and leaving the ancient route as it 
headed away toward Old Panama, I turned aside to 
the modern city. 

Then I was " called off the Greek chase " ; and a 
couple of evenings later, along with the evening train 
and the evening fog, the Inspector " blew in " from 
his forty-two days' vacation in the States, like a 
breath from far-off Broadway. Buffalo Bill had 
been duly opened and started on his season's way, 
the absent returned, and Corporal Castillo suddenly 
dwindled again to a mere corporal. 

As everything must have its flaws, perhaps the 
chief one that might be charged against the Z. P. is 
" red tape." Strictly speaking it is no Z. P. fault 
at all, but a weakness of all government. One ex- 
ample will suffice. 

During the month of May I was assigned the in- 
vestigation of certain alleged conditions in Panama's 
restricted district. The then head of the plain- 
clothes division gave me carte blanche, but suggested 
that I need not spare my expense account in libating 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 289 

the various establishments until I " got acquainted " 
sufficiently with the inmates to pick up indirectly the 
information desired. 

Which general line I followed and, the information 
having been gathered and the report made up, I pro- 
ceed to make out my expenditures of $45 for the 
month to forward to Empire for reimbursement. 
Now it needs no deep detective experience to know 
that in such cases you naturally begin with, " Well, 
what you going to drink, girls ? " and end by pay- 
ing the bill in a lump sum — a large lump sum — 
and go your way in peace. What more then could 
I do than set down such items as : 

"May 12, Liquor, investigation, Panama — 
$6.50?" 

But here I began to feel the tangling strands. 
Was it not stated that all applications for reimburse- 
ment required an exact itemized account of each sep- 
arate expenditure, with the price of each? It did. 
But in the first place I did not know half the bever- 
ages consumed in that investigation by sight, smell, 
or name. In the second place I came ostensibly as 
a " rounder " ; it would perhaps have been advisable 
at the close of each evening's entertainment to draw 
out note-book and pencil and starting the round of 
the table announce: 

" Now, girls, I 'm a dee-tective. No, keep yer 
places, I ain't going to pinch nobody. Anyhow I 'm 
only a Zone detective. But I just want to ask you a 



290 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

few questions. Now, Mamie, what 's that you 're 
drinking? Ah! A gin ricky. And just how much 
does that cost — here? And you, Flossie? An ab- 
sinthe frappe? Ah! Very good. And what is the 
retail price of that particular drink?" — and so on 
ad nauseum. 

♦ " Very true," replied authority, " that would of 
course be impossible. But to be reimbursed you 
must set down in detail every item of expenditure, 
and its price." 

Reason and government red tape move in two 
parallel lines, with the usual meeting-place. 

Nor was that all. While the black Peruvian was 
on my staff I gave him money for food. It was not 
merely expected, it was definitely so ordered. Yet 
when I set down: 

" May 27, To Peruvian for food — | .50." 
authority threw up its hands in horror. Did I 
not know that reimbursements were only for " liquor 
and cigars, cab or boat hire, and meals away from 
home? " I did. But I also knew that superiors had 
ordered me to feed the Peruvian. " To be sure ! " 
cried astounded authority. " But you set down 
such an expenditure as follows: 

" ' May 27, Two bottles of beer, Pan., investiga- 
tion— $ .50.' 

" And as you are allowed cab fare only for your- 
self, when you take the Peruvian or any one else out 
to Balboa in a cab you set down the item : 







pr^j-lM 



■ 



c$» 








TO 




....... 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 293 

" ' May 26, Cab, Ancon to Balboa and return, in- 
vestigation — $1.' " 

The upshot of all which was, not feeling able with 
all my patriotism to " set up " $45 worth of mixed 
drinks for Uncle Sam, I was forced to open another 
investigation and gather from all the Z. P. authori- 
ties on the subject, from Naos Island to Paraiso, the 
name and price of every known beverage. Then 
when I had fitted together a picture puzzle of these 
that summed up to the amount I had actually spent, 
I was called upon to sign a statement thereunder 
that " this is a true and exact account of expendi- 
tures during the month of May. So help me God." 

But then, as I have said before, these things are 
not Z. P. faults, they are the faults of government 
since government began. 

It had become evident soon after the Inspector's 
return that unless crime began to pick up down at the 
Pacific end of the Zone, I should find myself again 
banished to the foreign land of Gatun. For there 
had been a distinct rise in the criminal commodity at 
that end during the past weeks. The premonition 
soon fell true. 

" Take the 10 :55 to Gatun," said the Inspector 
one morning, without looking up from his filing case, 
" Corporal Macey will tell you about it when you 
get there." 



CHAPTER X 

: *¥ It 7HY, the fact is," said Corporal Macey, light- 
V V m g his meerschaum pipe until the match 
burned down to his fingers, " several little burglary 
stunts have been pulling themselves off since the ser- 
geant went on vacation. But the most aggrayva- 
atin' is this new one of twinty-two quarts of good 
Canadian Club bein' maliciously extracted from St. 
Martin's saloon last night." 

From which important beginning I fell quickly 
back into the old life again, derelicting about Gatun 
and vicinity by day, wandering the nights away in 
black, noisy New Gatun and along the winding back 
road under the cloud-scudding sky. Yet it was a 
different life. Gatun had changed. Even her con- 
crete light-house was winking all night now up among 
the I. C. C. dwellings. The breeze from off the 
Caribbean was heavy and lifeless. The landscape 
looked wet and lush and rampant, of a deep-seated 
green, and instead of the china-blue skies the dull, 
leaden-gray heavens seemed to hang low and heavy 
overhead, like a portending fate. On the wind- 
ing back road the jungle trees still stood out against 
the night sky, at times, too, there was a moon, but 

only a pale silver one that peered weakly here and 

294, 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 295 

there through the scudding gray clouds. The air 
grew more thick and sultry day by day, the heat was 
sticky, the weather dripping, with the sun only an ir- 
regular whitish blotch in the sky. Through the open 
windows the heavy, damp night came miasmically 
floating in, the very cigarettes mildewed in my 
pockets. Earth and air seemed heavy and toil- 
bowed by comparison with other days. The jungle 
still hummed busily, yet, it seemed, a bit mournfully 
as if preparing for production and unhilarious 
with the task before it, like a woman first learning 
of her pregnancy. Life seemed to hang more heavily 
even on humanity ; " Zoners " looked less gay and 
carefree than in the sunny dry season, though still 
far more so than in the north. One could not shake 
off a premonition of impending disaster in I know 
not what form — like that of Teufelsdroeck before 
he entered the " Center of Indifference." 

Dr. O of the Sanitary Department had gone 

up into the interior along the Trinidad river to hunt 
mosquitoes. Why he went so far away for them in 
this season was hard to understand. There he was, 
however, and the order had come to bring him back 
to civilization. The execution thereof fell, of course, 

to my friend B , who to the world at large is 

merely Policeman No. , to the force " Admiral 

of the Inland Fleet," and in the general scheme of 
things is a luckier man than Vanderchild to have for 
his task in life the patrolling of Gatun Lake, B *■ 



296 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

invited me to go along. There was nothing particu- 
lar doing in the criminal line around Gatun just 
then; moreover the doctor was known to be well 
armed and there was no telling just how much 
resistance he might offer a single policeman. I ac- 
cepted. 

I was at the appointed rendezvous promptly at 
seven, a pocket filled with commissary cigars. Strict 
truthfulness demands the admission that it was really 

eight, however, when B came wandering down 

the muddy steps behind the railroad station, followed 
by a black prisoner with a ten-gallon can of gasoline 
on his head. When that had been poured into the 
tank, we were off across the ever-rising waters of 
Gatun Lake. For Gatun police launch is one of 
those peculiar motor-boats that starts the same 3ay 
you had planned to. 

It was such a day as could not have been bet- 
tered had it been made to order, with a week to think 
out the details, — a dry-season day even to the At- 
lantic breeze that goes with it, a sort of Indian sum- 
mer of the rainy season; though the heavy battal- 
ions of gray clouds that hung all around the hori- 
zon as if awaiting the order to charge warned the 
Zone to make merry while it might, for to-morrow it 
would surely rain — in deluges. The lake, much 
higher now than in my former Gatun days, was lick- 
ing at the 27-foot level that morning. Under the 
brilliant blue sky it looked like some vast unruffled 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 299 

mirror — which is no figure of speech, but plain 
fact. 

" Through a Forest in a Motor-boat " we might 
have dubbed the trip. We had soon crossed the un- 
broken expanse of the lake and were moving through 
a submerged forest. Splendid royal palms stood up 
to their necks in the water, corpulent, century-old 
giants of the jungle stood on tip-toe with their 
jagged noses just above the surface, gasping their 
last. Great mango-trees laden with fruit were de- 
scending into the flood. The lake was so mirror- 
like we could see the heads of drowning palm-trees 
and the blue sky with its wisps of snow-white 
feathery clouds as plainly below as above, so mir- 
ror-like the protruding stump of a palm looked like 
a piece of just double that length and exactly equal 
ends floating upright like a water thermometer, so 
reflective that the broken end of a branch showing 
above the surface appeared to be an acute angle of 
wood floating exactly at the angle in impossible 
equilibrium. 

Our prisoner and crew was from " Bahbaydos " — 
only you can't pronounce it as he did, nor make the 
" a " broad enough, nor show the inside of your red 
throat clear back to the soft palate to contrast with 
the glistening black skin of your carefree, grinning 
face. Theoretically he was being punished for as- 
sault and battery. But if this is punishment to be 
sentenced to cruise around on Gatun Lake I wonder 



300 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

crime on the Zone is so rare and unusual. This much 
I am sure, if I were in that particular " Badgyan's " 
shoes — no, he had none ; but his tracks, say — the 
day my time ran out I should pick a quarrel with a 
Jamaican and leave his countenance in such a condi- 
tion that the judge could find no grounds for a rea- 
sonable doubt in the matter. 

We were mounting the river Trinidad. River, 
yes, but we followed it only because it had kept back 
the jungle and left a way free of tree-tops, not be- 
cause there was not water enough anywhere, in any 
direction, to float a boat of many times our draught. 
Turns so sharp we rocked in our own wake; once 
we passed acres upon acres of big, cod-like fish 
floating dead upon the water among the branches 
and the forest rubbish. It seems the lake in rising 
spread over some poisonous mineral in the soil. But 
life there was none, except the rampant green dying 
plant life in every direction to the horizon. There 
were not even birds, other than now and then a stray 
snow-white slender one of the heron species that fled 
majestically away across the face of the nurtureless 
waters as we steamed — no, gasolined down upon 
it. Soon after leaving Gatun we had passed a 
couple of jungle families on their way to market in 
their cayucas laden with mounds of produce, — plump 
mangoes with a maidenly blush on either cheek, fat 
yellow bananas, grass-green plantains, a duck or a 
chicken standing tied by one leg on top of it all and 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 301 

gazing complacently around at the scene with the 
air of an experienced tourist. It was two hours 
later that we sighted the next human being. He 
was a solitary old native paddling about at the en- 
trance to the " grass-bird region " in a huge dug- 
out as time-scarred as himself. 

It was near here that weeks before I had turned 
with " Admiral " B up a little stream now for- 
ever gone to a knoll on which sat the thatched shelter 
of a negro who had " taken to the bush " and re- 
fused to move even when notified that he was living 
on U. S. public domain. When we had knocked from 
the trees a box of mangoes and turkey-red 

marafiones, B touched a match to the thatch 

roof and almost before we could regain the launch 
the shack was pouring skyward in a column of 
smoke. Even the squatter's old table and chair and 
a barrel of tumbled odds and ends entirely outside 
the hut — it had no walls — caught fire, and 
when we lost sight of the knoll only the blazing 
stumps of the four poles that had supported the 
roof remained. 

B had burned whole villages in this lake ter- 
ritory, after the owners with legal claims had been 
paid condemnation damages. Long ago the natives 
had been warned to move, and the banks of the lake- 
to-be specified. But many of these skeptical chil- 
dren of nature had taken this as a vain " yanqui " 
boast and either refused to move until burned out or 



302 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

had rebuilt their hovels on land that in a few months 
more would also be flooded. 

The rescue expedition proceeded. Once we got 
caught in the top-most branches of a tree, released 
from which we pushed on along the sinuous river that 
had no banks. It was not hot, even at noonday. 
We sweated a bit in poling a thirty-foot boat out of 
a tree-top, but cooled again directly we were off. 
My kodak was far away at the other end of the Zone. 
But then, on second thought it was better for once 
to enjoy nature as it was without trying to carry it 
away. Kodaking is a species of covetousness, any- 
way, an attempt to bear away home with us and 
hoard for our own the best we come upon in our 
travels. Whereas here, of course, it was impos- 
sible. The greatest of artists could not have car- 
ried away a tenth of that scene, a scene so fascina- 
ting that though we had tossed into the bottom of 
the boat at the start a bundle of fresh New York 
papers — and fresh New York papers are not often 
scorned down on the Zone — they still lay in the 
bottom of the boat when the trip ended. 

At length little thatched cottages began to ap- 
pear on knolls along the way, and as we chugged our 
way around the tree-tops upon them the inhabitants 
slipped quickly into some clothes that were evidently 
kept for just such emergencies. Then we began 
nearing higher land, so that the upper and then the 
lower branches of the forest stood out of water, then 




B. touched a match to the thatch roof 




The edge of the drowning forest 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 305 

only the ends of the lower limbs clipped in the rising 
flood, downcast, as if they knew the sentence of 
death was upon them also. For though there was 
sunk already beneath the flood a forest greater than 
ten Fontainebleaus, the lake was steadily rising a 
full two inches a day. Where it touched that morn- 
ing the 27-foot level, in a few months more, says 
" the Colonel," it will reach the 87-foot level and 
spread over one hundred and sixty-four square miles 
of territory — and when " the Colonel " makes an 
assertion wise men hesitate to put their money on 
the other horse. Then will all this vast area with 
more green than in all the state of Missouri disap- 
pear forever beneath the flood and man may dive 
down, down into the forest and see what the world 
was like in Noah's time, and fancy the sunken cities 
of Holland, for many a famous route, and villages 
older than the days of Pizarro will be forever wiped 
out by the rising waters — a scene to be beheld to- 
clay nowhere else, and in a few years not even here. 
At last we were really in a river, an overflowed 
river, to be sure, where it would have been hard to 
find a landing-place or a bank among those tree 
trunks knee-deep in water. We had long since 
crossed the Zone line, but our badges were still 
valid. For it has pleased the Republic of Panama, 
at a whispered word from " Tio Sam," to cede to 
the Z. P. command over all Gatun Lake and for three 
miles around it, as far as ever it may spread. 



306 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Then all at once we were startled by a hearty hail 

from among the trees and I looked up to see Y , 

of the Smithsonian, fully dressed, standing waist- 
deep in the water at the edge of the forest, waving 
an insect trap in one hand. 

" What the devil are you doing there? " I 
gasped. 

" Doing? I 'm taking a walk along the old Gatun- 
Chorrera trail, and I fancy I '11 be about the last 
man to travel it. Come on up to camp." 

On a mango-shaped knoll thirty miles from Gatun 
that will also soon be lake bottom, we found a na- 
tive shack transformed into the headquarters of a 
scientific expedition. We sat down to a frontier 
lunch which called for none of the excuses made for 
it by Y when he appeared in his dripping full- 
dress and joined us without even bothering to change 
his water-spurting shoes. In his boxes he had care- 
fully stuck away side by side an untold number of 
members of the mosquito family. Queer vocation; 
but then, any vocation is good that gives an excuse 
to live out in this wild tropical world. 

By one we had Dr. O aboard and were waving 

farewell to the camp. The return, of course, was not 
the equal of the outward trip; even nature cannot 
duplicate so perfect a thing. But two raging 
showers gave us views of the drowning jungle under 
another aspect, and between them we awakened vast 
rolling echoes across the silent flooded world by shoot- 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 307 

ing at flocks of little birds with an army rifle that 
would have killed an elephant. 

It'is not hard to realize why the bush native does 
not love the American. Put yourself in his breech- 
clout. Suppose a throng of unsympathetic foreign- 
ers suddenly appeared resolved to turn all the world 
you knew into a lake, just because that absurd out- 
side world wanted to float steamers you never knew 
the use of, from somewhere you never heard of, to 
somewhere you did not know. Suppose a represent- 
ative of that unsympathetic government came snort- 
ing down upon you one day in a wild fearful inven- 
tion they called a motor-boat, as you were lolling 
under the thatch roof your grandfather built, and 
cried : 

" Come on ! Get out of here ! We 're going to 
burn your house and turn this country into a lake." 

Flood the land which was your great-grand- 
father's, the spot where you used to play leap-frog 
under the banana trees, the jungle lane where your 
mother's courtship days were passed and the ceiga 
tree under which she was wedded — if matters were 
ever carried to that ceremonious length. What 
though this foreign nation gave you a bag of pe- 
culiar pieces of metal for your trouble, when you 
had never seen a score of such coins in your life and 
barely knew the use of them, being acquainted with 
life only as it is picked from a mango-tree? The 
foreigners had cried, " Take this money and go buy 



308 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

a farm somewhere else," and you looked around you 
and saw all the world you had ever really known the 
existence of sinking beneath the rising waters. 
Where would you go, think you, to buy that new 
farm ? Even if you fled and found another unknown 
land high and dry, or a town, what could you do, 
having not the remotest idea how to live in a town 
with only pieces of metal to get food out of instead 
of the mango-tree that had stood behind the house 
your grandfather built ever since you were born and 
dropped mangoes whenever you were hungry? To 
say the least you would be some peeved. 

It was midafternoon when the white bulk of 
Gatun locks rose on the horizon. Then the lake 
opened out, the great dam, that is rather a connect- 
ing link between two ranges of hills, spread across all 
the landscape, and at four I raced up the muddy 
steps behind the station to a telephone. Five 
minutes later I was hurrying away across locks and 
dam to the marshland beyond the Spillway to in- 
quire who, and wherefore, had attempted to burn up 
the I. C. C. launch attached to dredge No. . 

My Canal Zone days were drawing rapidly to a 
close. I could have remained longer without regret, 
but the world is wide and life is short. Soon came 
the day, June seventeenth, when I must go back 
across the Isthmus to clear up the last threads of 
my existence as a " Zoner." Chiefly for old times' 
sake I dropped off at Empire. But it was not the 



ZONE POLICEMAN 88 311 

same Empire of the census. Almost all the old 
crowd was gone; one by one they had "kissed the 
Zone good-by." "The boss" of those days had 
never returned, " smiling Johnny " had been trans- 
ferred, even Ben had " done quit an' gone back to 
B^hbaydos." The Zone is like a small section of 
life ; as in other places where generations are short 
one catches there a hint of what old age will be. It 
was like wandering over the old campus when those 
who were freshmen in our day had hawked their 
gowns and mortarboards and gone their way ; I felt 
like a man in his dotage with only the new, unknown, 
and indifferent generation about him. 

I went down to the old suspension bridge. Far 
down below was the same struggling energy, the 
same gangs of upright human ants, the " cut " with 
its jangle and jar of steam-shovels and trains still 
stretching away endless in either direction. Here 
as in the world at large generations of us may 
come and pass away, but the tearing of the shovels 
at the rocky earth, the racing of dirt-laden trains 
for the Pacific goes unbrokenly on, as the world and 
its work will continue without a pause when we are 
gone indeed. 

Soon the water will be turned in and nine-tenths 
of all this labor will be submerged and forever hid- 
den from view. The swift growth of the tropics 
will quickly heal the scars of the steam-shovels, and 
palm-trees will wave the steamer on its way through 



312 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

what will seem almost a natural channel. Then 
blase travelers lolling in their deck chairs will gaze 
about them and snort: 

" Huh ! Is that all we got for nine years' work 
and half a billion dollars ? " They will have for- 
gotten the scrubbing of Panama and Colon, forgot- 
ten the vast hospitals with great surgeons and 
graduate nurses, the building of hundreds of houses 
and the furnishing of them down to the last center 
table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the entire 
P. R. R., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a 
year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on the 
pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things 
so essential to the success of the enterprise yet that 
leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the 
building of the canal is the accomplishment of the 
United States in showing the natives how life can be 
lived safely and healthily in tropical jungles. Yet 
the lesson will not be learned, and on the heels of 
the last canal builder will return all the old slovenli- 
ness and disease, and the native will sink back 
into just what he would have been had we never 
come. 

I caught a dirt-train to Balboa. There the very 
town at which I had landed on the Zone five months 
before was being razed to give place to the perma- 
nent, reenforced-concrete city that is to be the 
canal headquarters. Balboa police station was only 
a pile of lumber, with a band of negroes drilling 



313 

away the very rock on which it had stood. I took 
a last view of the Pacific and her islands to far Ta- 
boga, where Uncle Sam sends his recuperating chil- 
dren to enjoy the sea baths, hill climbs, and unri- 
valed pine-apples. It was never my good fortune to 
get to Taboga. With thirty days' sick leave a year 
and countless ailments of which I might have been 
cured free of charge and with the best of care, 
I could not catch a thing. I had not even the luck 
of my friend — who, by dint of cross-country runs 
in the jungle at noonday and similar industrious 
efforts, worked up at last a temperature of 99° and 
got his week at Taboga. I stuck immovable at 
98,6°. 

Soon after five I had bidden Ancon farewell and 
set off on the last ride across the Isthmus. There 
was a memory tucked away in every corner. Corozal 
hotel was still rattling with dishes, Paraiso peeped 
out from its lap of hills, Culebra with its penitentiary 
where burglarizing negroes go, sunk away into the 
past. Railroad Avenue in Empire was still lined 
with my " enumerated " tags ; through an open door 
I caught a glimpse of a familiar short figure, one 
foot resting lightly and familiarly on a misapplied 
gas-pipe, the elbow crooked as if something were 
held between the fingers. At Bas Obispo I strained 
my eyes in vain to make out a familiar face in 
the familiar uniform, there was a glimpse of " Old 
Fritz " water-gauge as we rumbled across the 



314 ZONE POLICEMAN 88 

Chagres, and the train churned away into the heavy 
green uninhabited night. 

Only once more was I aroused, as the lights of 
Gatun flashed up ; then we rolled past the noisy glar- 
ing corner of New Gatun and on to Colon. In 
Cristobal police station I put badge and passes into 
a heavy envelope and dropped them into the train- 
guard's box; then turned in for my last night on 
the Zone. For the steamer already had her fires up 
that would bear me, and him who was the studious 
corporal of Miraflores, away in the morning to 
South America. My police days were ended. 

Then a last hand to you all, oh, Z. P. May you 
live long and continue to do your duty frankly and 
unafraid. I found you men when I expected only 
policemen. I reckon my days among you time well 
spent and I left you regretting that I could stay no 
longer with you — and when I leave any place with 
regret it must be possessed of some exceeding subtle 
charm. But though the world is large, it is also 
small. 



a 



So I'll meet you later on, 

In the place where you have gone, 

WWp — " 



Where —" 



Well, say at San Francisco in 1915, anyway. 
Hasta luego. 



THE END 




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